The Wrap | 22 – 28 Nov 2025
Asia Tech Lens’ weekly digest of the signals, shifts, and stories shaping Asia’s tech future
Editor’s Note
Korea is pulling stablecoins into regulated finance, India and Malaysia are pouring billions into hyperscale AI infrastructure, and Singapore is reshaping its national AI stack by choosing Alibaba’s Qwen over Meta for local relevance. At the same time, governments are tightening platform controls and automating borders—from Singapore forcing Apple and Google to close scam loopholes to Indonesia’s biometric corridors and China’s humanoid trials. The region’s focus is shifting from apps to infrastructure, and from hype to the systems that secure identity, compute, and trust at scale.
Podcast Spotlight | Kelvin Teo, Funding Societies
The Hard Truths Most Fintech Founders Learn Too Late
In this episode of Asia Tech Lens: Founder Stories, we unpack one of Southeast Asia’s most instructive fintech stories: how Kelvin Teo built Funding Societies | Modalku into the region’s largest SME digital lender—and the painful lessons most founders only learn the hard way.
During his time at Harvard Business School, Kelvin heard Peter Thiel argue that Asia didn’t need “more innovation,” it needed better execution. That provocation pushed Kelvin and his co-founder, Reynold Wijaya, to confront a structural financing gap no one wanted to touch.
What followed was a decade of difficult, often unglamorous work: building credit models with barely any data, engaging regulators before frameworks existed, surviving liquidity crunches and layoffs, expanding across markets with wildly different risk profiles, and learning how founder alignment becomes the decisive ingredient for long-term resilience.
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Crypto & Fintech | South Korea
South Korea’s Top Crypto Exchange in $10B Fintech Merger
Naver Financial is set to acquire Dunamu, the operator of Upbit—South Korea’s largest crypto exchange—in a US$10.29 billion all-stock deal that will make Dunamu’s founders the largest shareholders in Naver. The merger, now awaiting Fair Trade Commission approval, keeps both firms’ core businesses running while they explore restructuring and joint growth initiatives. The deal follows the U.S.’s stablecoin legislation in July, which has accelerated global competition to link traditional finance with tokenized currencies.
Bottom Line: The merger shows South Korea’s fintech giants converging on stablecoins as the next payments battleground—bringing crypto infrastructure deeper into the country’s mainstream financial system.
AI Infrastructure | India
Reliance and Partners Commit US$11B to Build India’s Next AI Mega-hub
Reliance Industries and its joint-venture partners Brookfield and Digital Realty will invest US$11 billion over five years to build 1 gigawatt of AI data-center capacity in the Indian’s state of Andhra Pradesh. The project, branded Digital Connexion, will anchor a 400-acre AI-native data-center campus in Visakhapatnam—now emerging as one of India’s most aggressive bets on hyperscale compute.
The announcement follows Google’s plan to build its largest AI hub outside the U.S. in the same city, and comes amid a surge in AI-driven data-center investment across India. National capacity is expected to more than triple to 4.5 GW by 2030, with TCS–TPG and other domestic players also committing billions.
Bottom Line: India is positioning Visakhapatnam as a global AI compute cluster, with Reliance’s US$11 billion push signaling that the country’s data-center race is accelerating.
AI | Singapore
Singapore Picks Alibaba’s Qwen Over Meta for Its AI Model
Singapore’s national multimodal AI program has shifted its Sea-Lion model family off Meta’s architecture and onto Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen platform. The newest release—Qwen-Sea-Lion-v4—is built on the Qwen3-32B foundation model, supports 119 languages and dialects, and was trained on 36 trillion tokens plus an additional 100 billion tokens focused on Southeast Asian languages. Singapore launched the Sea-Lion program in late 2023 with S$70 million in funding as part of a broader push to build AI capacity aligned with local linguistic diversity and national requirements.
Bottom Line: Singapore’s pivot from Meta to Alibaba underscores how regional language capability is becoming the decisive factor in national AI strategy.
Digital Safety | Singapore
Singapore Orders Apple and Google to Crack Down on Gov-impersonation Scams
Singapore has directed Apple and Google to deploy anti-spoofing measures on iMessage and Google Messages after government-impersonation scams nearly tripled in the first half of 2025 to 1,762 cases, with losses hitting S$126.5 million. The new rules—issued under the Online Criminal Harms Act—require both firms to block or de-emphasize profile names that mimic “gov.sg” or agency IDs, and to filter messages from accounts using spoofed identifiers. Neither iMessage nor Google Messages currently falls under Singapore’s SMS Sender ID Registry, creating a loophole scammers have exploited by mimicking the color and layout of legitimate gov.sg SMS threads.
Bottom Line: Singapore is putting Big Tech on notice to harden their messaging systems, as scams get more sophisticated and shift from SMS to encrypted and IP-based platforms.
Biometrics | Indonesia
Indonesia Deploys World’s First Biometric Immigration Corridor
Indonesia has become the first country globally to deploy a biometric “seamless corridor,” allowing travelers to clear immigration without stopping. The system verifies passengers via pre-submitted passport data and real-time biometric authentication, removing paperwork, queues, and physical checkpoints.
Two corridors are being installed at Jakarta’s Soekarno–Hatta Airport, with a third planned for Surabaya; seniors and passengers with disabilities will be the first to use the system via pre-registration. The technology has been battle-tested during annual pilgrim movements, previously processing over 30 border crossings per minute.
Bottom Line: Indonesia is turning its airports into fully automated border gateways—setting a regional benchmark as biometric travel moves from pilot phase to national infrastructure.
Robotics | China
China to Trial Humanoid Robots at China-Vietnam Border
Shenzhen-based UBTech has secured a US$37 million contract to deploy its latest Walker humanoid robots at a testing center near China’s border with Vietnam, marking one of the country’s first real-world trials of humanoids in public administration. The robots—capable of swapping their own batteries—will be tested for crowd management, logistics handling, and patrol duties, with deliveries beginning in December. UBTech claims over 1.1 billion yuan in Walker-series sales so far this year, as Chinese firms race to convert R&D breakthroughs and robot “sports” spectacles into commercial deployments.
Bottom Line: China is moving humanoid robots from arena demos to frontline infrastructure—using border crossings as a proving ground for scaled, state-backed adoption.
Digital Economy | Malaysia
Malaysia Takes the Lead in Southeast Asia’s Digital Boom
Malaysia’s digital economy expanded 19% year-on-year to US$39 billion in 2025, overtaking all Southeast Asian markets and outpacing the region’s 15% growth, according to the latest e-Conomy SEA Report by Google, Temasek and Bain. E-commerce and a sharp rebound in online travel drove the surge, supported by stable inflation, visa liberalization and digital tourism campaigns ahead of Visit Malaysia 2026.
Malaysia captured 32% of SEA’s private AI funding in the past year and half of the region’s IPO listings, while data-center capacity jumped from 120 MW to 690 MW with further 350% expansion planned. Digital financial services also saw double-digit growth across payments, lending, wealth and insurance.
Bottom Line: Malaysia has seized the growth crown in Southeast Asia’s digital economy, but sustaining leadership will hinge on broadening AI-driven innovation beyond fintech and converting massive infrastructure investments into durable economic advantage.
Signals to Watch
Stablecoins are shifting from crypto to regulated finance
Naver’s US$10B absorption of Upbit shows Korea’s fintech establishment repositioning stablecoins as mainstream payments infrastructure. With Singapore tightening anti-spoofing rules and Indonesia modernizing borders, governments across Asia are quietly building the regulatory and technical pipes that could make tokenized fiat a regulated layer in everyday commerce.Asia’s AI infrastructure race is entering a megaproject phase
Reliance’s US$11B “AI mega-hub,” Malaysia’s 350% data-center expansion plans, and Google/TCS investments signal escalating capital intensity in compute infrastructure. India and Malaysia are positioning themselves as alternative hyperscale clusters to Singapore and Taiwan—a shift that could rebalance regional power in AI hosting and sovereign compute.National AI strategies are becoming deeply local — linguistics as a moat
Singapore’s pivot from Meta’s Llama to Alibaba’s Qwen underscores a critical trend: countries want AI models tuned for their languages, regulations, and public-sector use cases. Regional AI capability is no longer about the biggest model—it’s about the most locally aligned one.States are turning platform governance into national security
Singapore forcing Apple and Google to harden their messaging apps marks a new phase: platform design, identity logic, and scam-prevention are now state-mandated requirements. As scams evolve faster than consumer education, Big Tech is being required to embed trust and provenance into their systems—especially in small, high-trust economies.Borders are becoming Asia’s frontline testbeds for automation
Indonesia’s seamless biometric corridor and China’s humanoid border-management trial show how Asia is using immigration choke-points as controlled environments to deploy AI, biometrics, robotics, and automated decision systems. Expect these high-friction environments to become the earliest large-scale deployments of embodied AI.Robotics is moving from spectacle to state deployment
UBTech’s humanoids at the China-Vietnam border signify a shift from viral demos and robot “sports” to operational deployments in public administration. This is where China aims to lead globally: mass deployment in logistics, security, and frontline state functions.Southeast Asia’s growth hierarchy is being rewritten
Malaysia’s 19% digital economy surge—beating Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore— signals a temporary but meaningful reshuffling of regional digital momentum. With AI funding concentration, Google’s cloud region, IPO activity, and aggressive data-centre buildout, Malaysia is emerging as the region’s surprise outperformer.
The Takeaway
Asia’s technology landscape this week shows a clear pivot from software-first narratives to the hard, sovereign infrastructure that underpins digital power.India and Malaysia are racing to build hyperscale AI capacity, and Singapore is choosing locally tuned models over global ones. With governments tightening platform controls, automating borders, and testing humanoids in real public systems, the region’s next chapter will be defined by who can secure trusted identity, compute, and payments at scale, the physical backbone on which AI-era services will run.
Sources
Decrypt: South Korea’s Top Crypto Exchange to Be Absorbed By Tech Giant in $10.3 Billion Deal
Yahoo Finance: Reliance Industries, JV partners to invest $11 billion in India AI data capacity
Tech Node: Singapore’s national AI program drops Meta model and switches to Alibaba’s Qwen
Channel NewsAsia: Singapore orders Google, Apple to take measures to prevent government impersonation scam messages
VNExpress International: Indonesia becomes world’s first country to apply biometric ‘seamless corridor’
Straits Times: China to trial humanoid robots guiding crowds at border crossings
Tech Wire Asia: e-Conomy SEA 2025: Malaysia leads region with 19% digital economy surge