The Wrap | 6 – 12 Dec 2025
Asia Tech Lens’ weekly digest of the signals, shifts, and stories shaping Asia’s tech future
Editor’s Note:
This week Washington loosened one of its toughest curbs, reopening a channel for Nvidia’s H200s into China even as reports surfaced around DeepSeek and Blackwell GPUs banned from export to China.
At the same time, India, the Gulf and smaller Asian markets reminded us that infrastructure is where power is accruing. New Delhi is being courted as a long-term AI base by Amazon and its peers, Dubai is turning biometric hotel check-in into city infrastructure, and Pakistanis are being plugged into a 50-country QR network via a Chinese-linked wallet. Layer on Korea’s new deepfake labelling rules and Malaysia’s royal-backed stablecoin, and a pattern emerges: who gets to move compute, money and identity across borders—and under which rulebook—is now the real contest.
Podcast Spotlight | Rob Schimek, Group CEO, bolttech
In this episode, we sit down with Rob Schimek, Group CEO of bolttech, to unpack one of Asia’s most ambitious insurtech scale-up stories—and why the world’s protection gap is now a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity hiding in plain sight.
We dig into the big structural questions: Why is insurance still so underpenetrated across Asia? How do you build trust with regulators, distribution partners, and millions of customers? And what does it take to create a digital insurance exchange across markets with wildly different rules, expectations, and levels of financial maturity?
This conversation goes deep into leadership, ecosystem design, and the future of embedded protection worldwide.
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Semiconductors | China
Trump’s U-Turn Sends China’s Tech Giants Back to Nvidia
President Trump has reversed course on one of Washington’s toughest chip curbs, clearing Nvidia to export its H200 AI processors to “approved customers” in China in exchange for the U.S. government taking a 25% fee on those sales. The H200 is far more powerful than the the previously export-eligible H20.
Reuters now reports that ByteDance and Alibaba have already approached Nvidia about placing large H200 orders but await Beijing’s decision on which firms will be allowed to buy. Chinese regulators have recently barred foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers and told some big tech firms to halt new Nvidia orders, in part to push adoption of domestic suppliers.
Bottom Line: America’s decision seem to be motivated more by economics than ideology and places the Chinese government in front of the same dilemma.
Semiconductors | China
Nvidia Rejects Claims that DeepSeek Uses Its Chips
Nvidia has rebutted a report that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is using smuggled Blackwell GPUs to train its next model, saying it has seen “no substantiation” or evidence of “phantom data centers” being built, dismantled and reconstructed in China to evade export controls. The company added that while such smuggling “seems far-fetched,” it investigates all tip it receives.
The response came after ‘The Information’ reported that DeepSeek had been working with the chipmaker’s newer Blackwell chips that were allegedly smuggled into China.
Bottom Line: The DeepSeek story, real or not, underscores that Nvidia remains very careful about legal risks associated with trade wars.
AI & Investment | India
Amazon’s US$35b India Push
Amazon will invest more than US$35 billion in India by 2030, almost doubling the roughly US$40 billion it has already put into the country. It is pitching the plan around three pillars: AI-driven digitization, export growth and job creation – including one million additional jobs, lifting exports via its marketplace from US$20 billion to US$80 billion, and bringing AI tools to 15 million small businesses.
The move lands alongside a broader AI infrastructure race: Microsoft has pledged US$17.5 billion for “sovereign-ready” AI cloud in India, while Google is planning a US$15 billion gigawatt-scale AI hub in Visakhapatnam.
Bottom Line: Amazon’s pledge shows how central India has become to the global AI build-out – Big Tech now needs New Delhi as much as New Delhi needs Big Tech.
AI | South Korea
Korea Slaps Mandatory Labels on AI-Generated Ads
South Korea will require clear labels on AI-generated photos and videos used online, after a surge in fake ads featuring “virtual” doctors and celebrity deepfakes pushing food and pharmaceutical products. Anyone who produces, edits or uploads AI-made content will have to flag it as AI-generated, and platforms must provide standard labelling tools and ensure users comply.
The government plans to introduce punitive damages of up to five times actual harm and sharply increase penalties under advertising laws, with changes tied to the AI Basic Act coming into force from January 2026.
Bottom Line: New AI tools have pushed deepfakes into the public sphere, forcing governments from China to South Korea to respond with stricter rules.
Stablecoin | Malaysia
Johor Crown Prince Unveils Ringgit-Backed Stablecoin
Malaysian king’s eldest son Ismail Ibrahim has unveiled a ringgit-backed stablecoin aimed at cross-border trade and attracting foreign investment across the Asia-Pacific. His telecommunications firm, Bullish Aim Sdn, is rolling out the token, called RMJDT, which is pegged to the Malaysian ringgit. The initial supply of 500 million tokens (about US$121.5 million) will be backed by ringgit cash deposits and short-term Malaysian government bonds. Officials say the goal is to turn RMJDT into a standard rail for crypto-based payments and to bolster the ringgit’s role in cross-border trade and foreign capital flows.
Bottom Line: RMJDT is not an outlier, but part of a broader wave of regulator-backed stablecoin pilots across Asia, as governments test how tokenised cash can support cross-border trade without losing control of capital flows.
FinTech | Pakistan
NayaPay Plugs Pakistanis Into Alipay+’s 50-Country Network
Pakistani fintech NayaPay has launched global QR payments via Alipay+, letting its users scan and pay at merchants in more than 50 countries using the same app they use at home. The tie-up connects Pakistanis to Alipay+’s network of 40 mobile wallet partners and over 150 million merchants across retail, dining, transport, healthcare and entertainment, adding overseas QR acceptance to NayaPay’s existing stack of Visa cards, transfers, bill pay and remittances.
Bottom Line: By linking NayaPay to Alipay+, Pakistanis get a de facto global wallet and China’s QR-based payment rails quietly gain another on-ramp in South Asia.
Smart Cities | Dubai
Dubai Hotels Roll Out Contactless Check-in
Dubai has implemented a citywide biometric hotel check-in system, letting travelers verify their identity once and bypass reception on future stays. Travelers upload their ID, add a biometric scan and confirm details on their phone before arrival; after that, a quick facial scan is enough to head straight to their room. All licensed hotels and holiday homes can plug into the same government-backed system through their own apps or websites, making this a unified city standard rather than a chain-by-chain feature. Globally, mobile and contactless check-ins are spreading, but adoption is fragmented. Each hotel or chain runs its own app, and ID checks still happen at the desk.
Bottom Line: By folding mandatory hotel ID checks into a single biometric platform, Dubai is using regulation to drive sector-wide digitization, not just smarter check-in.
Gaming | China
Tencent’s Global Games Machine Finds a New Gear
Tencent’s games business is enjoying a record sales year, bucking a wider industry slowdown with overseas hits such as Dying Light: The Beast, according to Bloomberg. The surge is tied to a deliberate shift under Michelle Liu, CEO of Tencent Games Global: shifting Tencent from a passive shareholder to a hands-on operator of its studios.
Liu’s team of around 1,000 now works closely with roughly 20 acquired global studios, offering support from concept and production discipline to data analytics and distribution, and influencing pricing decisions. Tencent reported 63.6 billion yuan in game revenue in the September quarter, with overseas game revenue up 43% year-on-year.
Bottom Line: Tencent is now running its overseas studios with the same data, process and live-ops muscle it honed at home, turning a scattered portfolio into a single global hit machine.
Signals to Watch
US chip controls are getting fuzzier at the top end.
Trump’s H200 reversal and Nvidia’s denial over “phantom” Blackwell smuggling both point to the same reality: Washington is trying to fine-tune, not simply tighten, access to frontier GPUs – even as enforcement gets harder to prove and politicization grows.India is now core AI infrastructure, not just a growth market.
Amazon’s US$35b plan, alongside Microsoft and Google’s multi-billion AI hubs, cements India as a place where Big Tech must build data centers, jobs and exports if it wants to stay in the global AI race.Asia is racing to build its own payments and crypto plumbing.
RMJDT and NayaPay–Alipay+ push in opposite directions but tell the same story: state-aligned and China-linked rails are spreading across APAC, turning stablecoins and QR wallets into cross-border infrastructure, not just consumer fintech.AI governance in Asia is moving from soft principles to hard rules.
Korea’s mandatory labels on AI-generated ads, echoing China’s broader content labelling, show regulators treating deepfakes as a systemic risk and pushing responsibility up the stack to platforms, not just creators.
The Takeaway
This week underscored how much leverage now sits in the underlying systems, not the apps on top. On chips, Washington’s H200 reversal and the DeepSeek flap show export controls getting more tactical, even as Nvidia’s China exposure stays under a microscope. India is cementing itself as core AI infrastructure, Korea and China are tightening rules on deepfakes, and new moves in stablecoins, QR payments and biometric check-ins are pulling money and identity deeper into state- and platform-controlled infrastructure. Tencent’s gaming push points in the same direction: control is shifting from individual titles to the rails underneath them, where Tencent’s data, tooling and live-ops shape how hits are made, run and monetized across its global studio network.
Sources:
Reuters: Exclusive: ByteDance, Alibaba keen to order Nvidia H200 chips after Trump green light, sources say
CNBC: Nvidia responds to report that China’s DeepSeek is using its banned Blackwell AI chips
The Business Times: Amazon says it will invest $35 billion in India by 2030 on AI, exports
The Korea Times: Korea to mandate labeling of AI-generated content to counter fake ads
Bloomberg: Malaysian Royal Launches Ringgit-Backed Stablecoin for Payments
Yahoo Finance: NayaPay Launches Global QR Payments for Pakistanis via Alipay+
Gulf News: Dubai launches citywide one-time contactless hotel check-in system
Bloomberg: Tencent Goes Hands-On to Reshape $10 Billion Global Games Empire