Infrastructure
When Fried Chicken and Beer Leads to a US$10 Billion Deal
There was a viral moment on the internet last week featuring three tech billionaires. Leaders of NVIDIA, Samsung, and Hyundai went for dinner at a fried-chicken restaurant in Seoul—they paid for everyone’s meal. It was a successful photo op, but one that overshadowed a more important reckoning: South Korea is turning into …
Can South Korea Replicate Its K-Pop Success in AI Chips?
For decades, South Korea’s global influence has been defined by its cultural exports—K-Pop, K-dramas, and K-beauty. Now, a new contender is rising: K-Chips, led by one fast-moving startup.
Hot Chips, Cool Solutions: Asia’s Race to Reinvent Data Center Cooling
In August, we asked if Southeast Asia was truly ready for an AI data center surge, given power shortages and rising costs. This week, we zoom in on one of the biggest bottlenecks: cooling, which can swallow a substantial chunk of a facility’s energy bill.
Can Nuclear Power Fuel Southeast Asia’s AI Boom?
Singapore’s data centres are approaching full capacity, and regulators warn that supply may soon fall behind. In Jakarta, proposals for hyperscale campuses are multiplying, even as utility planners warn of grid limitations. Across Southeast Asia, the AI boom is running headlong into a constraint that chips and GPU…
Invisible Arteries: Subsea Cables in the Age of AI
Every click, every call, every binge-watch. Even the fact that you are reading this article right now. All of it travels through subsea cables: bundles of fiber-optic glass threads, often no thicker than a garden hose, lying silently on the ocean floor. We don’t talk about them much, but they are the invisible arteries of the internet, carryin…
From Oil to Algorithms: The Middle East’s New Role in US–China Tech Rivalry
The Gulf’s oil giants, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are no longer content with being just energy superpowers. They are now betting big on technology and artificial intelligence, aiming to future-proof their economies and ease reliance on fossil fuels. Their new ambition: to become global AI hubs backed by billions of dollars in state investment.
Is Southeast Asia ready for an AI data center surge?
The AI boom isn’t coming, it’s already here. Behind the large language models (LLMs), image generators, and other machine learning tools are powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) to crunch vast amounts of data at incredible speed.
Can TikTok’s New Data Centers Buy Trust?
While TikTok reigns as the world's most popular short-video app, it continues to face many obstacles in the West due to concerns about its Chinese parentage.
China’s Bet on Domestic Tech: The Companies Poised to Gain Amid Rising Tariffs
Welcome to Asia Tech Lens, where we track Asia’s technology rise with perspective, without the hype, and free from rhetoric.