Section
Technology
Technology beyond the press release. What is being built, who pays for it, what it costs the rest of us.
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Tech Reportage
Malaysia’s draft AI law treats your training data and your model’s output as property
The National AI Office’s consultation closes 31 July, and the clause the Prime Minister calls the heart of the bill would let Kuala Lumpur, rather than your terms of service, decide who owns what a model trains on and what it generates.
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Tech Essay
BNP Paribas, Temasek and Rockefeller just put US$31m into mud
Rize just raised US$31m from BNP Paribas, Temasek, Rockefeller and Breakthrough Energy to bolt AI onto Vietnamese rice paddies, and the boring part is the whole point.
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Tech Essay
Southeast Asia raised US$7.4 billion in H1. One data-centre operator took US$4.5 billion of it.
Of the US$7.4 billion the region raised in six months, US$4.5 billion went to one Singapore-domiciled data-centre operator heading for a US$20 billion listing, and almost everything it is building sits across the Causeway.
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Tech Reportage
While the region argued about chatbots, Singapore quietly funded the robots
The largest Southeast Asian AI cheque of the season went to a company that teaches machines to see where satellites cannot, and the moat is exactly how unglamorous that is.
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Tech Essay
TikTok Builds the Servers, Cuts the People
ByteDance is pouring billions into Johor and Thai server halls the same month it cut trust-and-safety and commerce teams across three Southeast Asian capitals, and the swap has a name.
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Tech Essay
Southeast Asia now holds 2,000 data centres. It captures almost none of the margin.
The land, power and water are local; the models, the margin and the IP are almost entirely foreign, which makes the operator question simple: own a customer, not a GPU.
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Tech Essay
Indonesia is selling dirt, not software (which is exactly the point)
While the region argues over which model shipped this week, Jakarta is quietly trying to own a physical chokepoint in the energy transition, and the strategy lesson runs all the way down to the smallest operator.
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Tech Dispatch
Singapore took 99 percent of the AI-infrastructure money
Tracxn counts US$1.2 bn of disclosed Southeast Asian AI-infrastructure funding since 2019. One city banked nearly all of it, and that tells you who builds and who rents.
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Tech Dispatch
MTI raised the 2026 forecast. Manufacturing had its worst quarter since 2023.
Singapore posted Q1 GDP up 4.6 percent year on year. Manufacturing fell 4.9 percent quarter on quarter, the steepest single-quarter drop since 2023. The AI hardware tailwind has rolled off.
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Tech Essay
Novo Nordisk handed OpenAI its full operation. Singapore's contract labs are next.
Novo Nordisk's deal with OpenAI is being read as a drug-discovery story. The part that resets Singapore's biotech cluster is the supply chain, the manufacturing schedule, and the corporate operation.
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Tech Dispatch
The humanoid robot moment landed in Shenzhen. The first SEA buyers are warehouses in Johor.
Unitree opened UniStore on May 7, the first developer marketplace for humanoid robots, with 1,200 developers and 237 apps at launch. The R1 retails at US$4,900. The math works first in regional logistics, not in CBD towers.
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Tech Dispatch
Mistral's biggest SEA deployment skips the consumer market entirely.
Singtel and Mistral announced their AI-compute partnership at DC Tuas this week. The deployment targets Singapore's banks, government, healthcare, and telco workloads. The geography is the deal.