The Wrap | 15 – 21 Nov 2025
Asia Tech Lens’ weekly digest of the signals, shifts, and stories shaping Asia’s tech future.
Editor’s Note
Nvidia’s earnings reinforced the gravitational pull the company holds over Asia’s AI ecosystem. In Tokyo, the Nikkei snapped a four-day slide on the back of AI chip optimism, even as investors worry about Japan’s fiscal trajectory and a choppy relationship with Beijing. Further south, Singapore and Taiwan doubled down on AI as strategic infrastructure: DeepMind is planting a research lab in Singapore, GlobalFoundries is buying its way deeper into silicon photonics, and Taiwan is positioning itself as an “AI island” with billions in new spend and fresh Nvidia-powered data centers. At the same time, Johor’s water constraints and Taiwan’s power limits underline a harder truth: AI scale is now constrained as much by physical resources as by capital. This week’s podcast brings us all the way down to device level, with Superhexa’s hardware-first rethink of AI glasses – a reminder that the AI race is being fought from markets to molecules to eyewear.
Podcast Spotlight | Guo Jun, Superhexa
Why Superhexa Is Rethinking AI Glasses
In this episode of Asia Tech Lens: Founder Stories, Miro sits down with Guo Jun, Co-Founder and CMO of Beijing-based Superhexa – one of the most contrarian players in China’s AI hardware boom. While more than 100 Chinese companies rushed out feature-heavy AI glasses, Superhexa spent years obsessing over comfort, weight, thermals, audio, and true all-day battery life before adding any AI.
Guo unpacks what it takes to build hardware in China’s most unforgiving consumer arena: navigating Xiaomi’s ecosystem, surviving ODM economics, dealing with creator-driven demand, and competing with giants like OPPO, Vivo, and Huawei. The conversation also digs into domestic LLMs vs. ChatGPT, why phones still win many AI scenarios, and how a startup survives when one bad product cycle can kill the company.
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Markets | Japan
Nvidia’s earnings jolt Japan’s AI trade back to life
Japanese equities snapped a four-day losing streak as Nvidia’s stronger-than-expected forecast ignited a rebound in AI-linked stocks. The Nikkei 225 jumped as much as 4.2% intraday before closing up 2.7%, led by chip-exposed names like Advantest, Disco, and Ibiden.
The rally comes despite rising JGB yields, a weaker yen, concern over Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s stimulus plans, and a tense diplomatic backdrop with Beijing.
Bottom Line: Japan’s AI trade still dances to Nvidia’s tune, but fiscal stress and China tensions mean the market is surfing a narrow wave of optimism.
AI Research | Singapore
DeepMind plants a regional lab in Singapore
Google DeepMind is opening a new AI research lab in Singapore after doubling its Asia-based team over the past year. The lab will work with governments, universities, and companies across the region, with early priorities in education, healthcare, and science.
Executives describe Southeast Asia as one of the world’s fastest-growing AI adoption regions, positioning the lab as both a science hub and a bridge into real-world deployments.
Bottom Line: DeepMind’s lab turns Singapore from an AI customer into a co-author of the next wave of models and governance.
AI Silicon | Singapore
GlobalFoundries buys into Singapore’s silicon photonics stack
GlobalFoundries is acquiring Advanced Micro Foundry, a Singapore-based specialist in silicon photonics – the optical plumbing that keeps AI data centers from choking on their own traffic. The deal will combine AMF’s IP and local talent with GlobalFoundries’ global footprint, making the U.S. firm the largest pure-play silicon photonics foundry by revenue.
As part of the acquisition, a new silicon photonics R&D center of excellence will be set up in Singapore with A*Star, dovetailing with over S$1 billion in national semiconductor R&D investments.
Bottom Line: Singapore is quietly climbing higher up the AI value chain – into the optical interconnects that make hyperscale compute viable.
Data Centers & Resources | Malaysia
Johor’s AI boom hits the water wall
Johor has emerged as a major data center hub, with 15 sites live and dozens more planned, but authorities are now asking operators to delay new water-cooled expansions for at least 18 months. Drought, pollution incidents and distribution bottlenecks have strained supplies, triggering outages that have hit more than half of the state’s 1.7 million residents at times.
Even as Nvidia–YTL, Google and ByteDance push multi-billion-dollar AI infra projects into the state, Johor is tightening water- and power-usage efficiency standards before greenlighting new builds.
Bottom Line: Johor’s experience is a preview of AI’s resource politics: hyperscale demand meets hydrology, and not every region will have enough water to cool AI.
AI Infrastructure & Sovereignty | Taiwan
From ‘AI island’ vision to Nvidia-powered factories
Taiwan is rolling out a NT$100 billion (~US$3.2 billion) plan to become an “AI island”, centered on silicon photonics, quantum computing and AI robotics, with ambitions to rank among the top five countries globally in computing power.
The U.S.–Taiwan tech corridor is deepening in parallel: Google has opened its largest AI infrastructure hardware engineering center outside the U.S. on the island, and GMI Cloud is adding a US$500 million Nvidia Blackwell-powered “AI factory” with 7,000 GPUs and strong early demand.
All of this is colliding with power constraints, as Taiwan’s last nuclear plant has gone offline and renewables lag original targets.
Bottom Line: Taiwan is treating AI compute as strategic infrastructure, but its ability to deliver may depend less on chips than on electrons.
Robotics & Capital Markets | China
Unitree races towards a Star Market debut
Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics has finished China’s pre-IPO tutoring process in just four months, clearing a key hurdle for a planned Star Market listing. The humanoid and quadruped robot maker is reportedly targeting a valuation of up to US$7 billion, backed by more than US$260 million in funding so far.
The accelerated timetable underlines how strongly Beijing wants robotics and “new productive forces” to anchor its next phase of tech-led growth and self-reliance.
Bottom Line: Unitree’s sprint to market shows how deeply robotic platforms are now embedded in China’s industrial policy – and how quickly state-backed hardware champions can scale.
Web3 Payments | Southeast Asia
Grab and StraitsX test stablecoins as regional payment rails
Grab and StraitsX have signed an MOU to explore a Web3-connected wallet inside the Grab app and a stablecoin-based clearing and settlement layer for cross-border payments. The vision is to let users hold StraitsX-issued stablecoins like XSGD and XUSD and pay merchants via widely used Web3 wallets, while keeping custody and programmable payments fully compliant.
The proposed single integration layer would connect fragmented domestic payment systems and give merchants access to on-chain treasury and settlement tools under tight regulatory oversight.
Bottom Line: If this moves from MOU to production, Southeast Asia’s biggest super app could quietly normalize regulated stablecoins for everyday commerce.
Signals to Watch
Nvidia as a multi-layer gravity well. Nvidia continues to exert outsized influence across Asia’s tech landscape: its earnings lifted sentiment in Japan, driving a sharp rebound in AI-linked stocks; its technology underpins new regional infrastructure, from Malaysia’s YTL partnership to Taiwan’s GMI Cloud “AI factory”; and in markets like Taiwan, it sits at the centre of sovereign compute ambitions. Its roadmap increasingly shapes how capital and infrastructure plans evolve across the region — even as places like Singapore build broader, ecosystem-neutral strategies in photonics and advanced compute.
Compute nationalism, version 2.0. Taiwan’s “AI island” plan and Google’s twin bets in Singapore and Taiwan show how states are now competing less for model bragging rights and more for sustained, sovereign compute capacity.
Infra vs. resources. Johor’s cooling moratorium and Taiwan’s power constraints suggest water, land, and electrons are becoming the real chokepoints in AI – not just GPUs.
Hardware’s revenge. From Unitree’s robots to Superhexa’s glasses and AMF’s photonics, Asia’s AI story is increasingly physical: motors, optics, batteries, and heat budgets, not just tokens per second.
Regulated crypto creeping into the mainstream. The Grab–StraitsX collaboration hints at a future where stablecoins are less about speculation and more about invisible plumbing beneath cross-border retail payments.
The Takeaway
Asia’s AI moment is no longer about chasing frontier models; it’s about controlling the infrastructure that makes those models viable — from silicon photonics and AI factories to robotics platforms and increasingly strategic payment rails. Japan’s market rebound shows how deeply regional sentiment is wired into U.S. chip cycles, even as fiscal and geopolitical risks shadow the outlook. Singapore and Taiwan are positioning themselves as command hubs for AI research and compute, while Johor’s cooling pause is a reminder that the bottlenecks are shifting from capital to electricity, water, and land. Add in state-backed robotics, hardware-first wearables, and stablecoin experiments from super apps, and the pattern becomes clear: Asia’s next tech chapter will be shaped by who can build and sustain the physical layer of AI, not just the code that runs on top of it.
Sources:
Bloomberg: Japan’s Shares Rebound as Nvidia Relief Offsets Fiscal Jitters
Reuters: Google DeepMind to open new AI research lab in Singapore
Business Times Singapore / company statements: GlobalFoundries acquires Singapore semiconductor firm in push to expand AI portfolio; GlobalFoundries Acquires Advanced Micro Foundry, Accelerating Silicon Photonics Global Leadership and Expanding AI Infrastructure Portfolio
South China Morning Post: Data centres in Malaysia’s Johor told to wait for water ‘until mid-2027’
Reuters / Taiwan News: GMI Cloud to build $500 million AI data centre in Taiwan with Nvidia chips; GMI Cloud to build AI data center in Taiwan; related coverage of Foxconn–Nvidia AI data centre plans
Nikkei Asia: Taiwan plans to spend $3bn to pursue ‘AI island’ ambitions
Reuters: US, Taipei laud opening of Google’s new Taiwan AI engineering centre
South China Morning Post: China’s Unitree Robotics completes pre-IPO tutoring for onshore listing
Fintech News Singapore: Grab and StraitsX Explore Regulated Cross-Border Stablecoin Settlement