Saturday, 11 July 2026 · Daily Market Intel

Market Intel Sat, 11 Jul

Compute turns sovereign upstream; Southeast Asia owns the power and the capital.

Compute sovereignty focus · energy inputs · capital formation

Tech Breakthroughs
- With Nvidia's China share collapsing and Huawei near 50%, DeepSeek designs its own AI chip — Semafor
  
  DeepSeek is designing an in-house AI chip to cut its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei silicon, joining Alibaba and Baidu as US export controls erode Nvidia's China position and lift Huawei toward half the market.
  
  Positive-sum angle: More domestic silicon designers thicken China's whole compute supply chain, not just DeepSeek's. Every viable in-house chip gives fabs, packaging houses, and toolchain builders another customer, lowering the cost of the next design and widening the pool of hardware the entire model ecosystem can run on.
  
  What's the impact: SEA founders should plan for a second, cheaper inference supply chain forming outside the US stack. Benchmark now on Chinese accelerators and open weights, and structure data-residency and procurement so a Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City deployment can switch silicon without rewriting the roadmap.
Emerging Industries
- As the grid strains, who firms the megawatts? Berde deploys 200 MW solar and 500 MWh storage — SolarQuarter
  
  Berde Renewables, backed by I Squared Capital, will deploy 200 MW of solar and 500 MWh of battery storage across the Philippines and Thailand over three years with Sungrow and Solar Hive, targeting grid stability and daytime-to-evening load shifting.
  
  Positive-sum angle: Firming capacity lifts every player on the grid, not only Berde. Stored solar that carries into the evening peak lets utilities absorb more renewables, gives commercial buyers predictable power, and hands data centre and manufacturing investors the reliability case they need to site new load in the region.
  
  What's the impact: SEA operators betting on data centres and electrified manufacturing should treat storage as the gating input, not the panels. Founders in the Philippines and Thailand can build the C&I offtake, EPC, and battery-financing layers now, before the 2027 hyperscaler siting decisions lock the corridors.
Open Source Projects
- A 295B open model that beats GPT-5.5 on science: Tencent ships Hy3 under Apache 2.0 — GIGAZINE
  
  Tencent open-sourced Hy3, a 295B-parameter mixture-of-experts model activating 21B per token, under Apache 2.0 with no geographic carve-out. It processes documents with 47% fewer tokens than the far larger GLM-5.2 and tops GPT-5.5 on a scientific-research benchmark.
  
  Positive-sum angle: An Apache-licensed frontier model with no field-of-use clause compounds for everyone downstream. Startups, universities, and self-hosters can fork, fine-tune, and ship on it without legal review, and the token-efficiency gain lowers the running cost of every agent, tool, and product built on top.
  
  What's the impact: SEA founders and family offices funding AI should reset build assumptions around a permissive-licence, token-efficient frontier tier they can self-host. Deploy on local hardware in Singapore or Jakarta to keep data resident under MAS and Bank Indonesia rules, and spend the saved tokens on product, not inference.
Business Models
- Backing startups is too slow for the climate clock: 100x100 raises $100M to build 50 — Eco-Business
  
  Singapore-based venture builder 100x100, formerly Wavemaker Impact, closed a $100M Fund II to co-found and scale 50 climate companies across Southeast Asia and India, doubling its 2023 vehicle after co-founding 27 firms in eight countries.
  
  Positive-sum angle: A venture-building model spreads value wider than a cheque. By supplying founders, playbooks, and first capital from day zero, 100x100 lowers the cost of starting hard climate businesses, and each portfolio exit trains operators and de-risks the next cohort for every other investor in the region.
  
  What's the impact: SEA operators weighing their next move should study the venture-builder model, not just its portfolio. Experienced founders in Jakarta, Manila, and Bangalore can co-found into emissions-heavy sectors, energy, food, materials, on someone else's balance sheet, before the climate-procurement contracts get written.

Never miss a SEA deal.