Markets, business, and economic intelligence for Southeast Asia
SOUTHEAST ASIA EDITIONTechnology deals, platforms, and the companies reshaping how business gets done.
Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis finds that autonomous AI agents conducted 138 million payments on the Coinbase-incubated Base network by the third quarter of 2026, up from roughly 1,500 a year earlier, with most purchases costing less than a dime and happening within minutes of a bot receiving funds.
Tim ·
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called for the pace of AI development to slow given the safety risks involved. China's answer, in practice, was to launch 16 new AI models in a single month, with DeepSeek and Xiaomi among the companies racing to ship, underscoring how differently Washington and Beijing are weighing speed against caution.
Tim ·
Alibaba is touting a new AI chip it calls the most powerful yet built in China, timed to feed a data center buildout the company wants to grow past 20 gigawatts of global capacity by 2032. The announcement lands squarely inside China's broader push to build homegrown AI hardware as access to the most advanced American chips stays restricted.
Tim ·
Rakuten Group is teaming up with AST SpaceMobile to launch a direct to cell satellite service in Japan as early as 2026, letting ordinary smartphones connect to satellites without extra hardware. It is a direct challenge to SpaceX's Starlink and a bet that ordinary coverage gaps are worth billions to close.
Tim ·
With fewer people left alive who remember World War Two firsthand, educators in Japan are turning to an unlikely tool to keep the memory alive, having schoolchildren recreate the prewar streets of Tokyo's Bunkyo ward in Minecraft before it was destroyed in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of 1945.
Tim ·
Google has set up its first formal country office in Pakistan, framing the move as support for the country's IT export ambitions. Industry watchers see a different motive, a tech giant positioning itself early in a digital market that is still small today but growing fast.
Tim ·
