Simply put Chinese authorities have reportedly informed local organizations that they must buy locally rather than from Nvidia to meet their AI accelerator needs.
A report in the South China Morning Post indicates that authorities have informed buyers that Huawei should be at the top of their shopping lists for AI accelerators, but stopped short of issuing a formal ban on NVIDIA kit. Citing two anonymous sources.
Huawei or other Chinese companies are not known to have developed anything comparable to Nvidia’s current accelerators. Don’t worry about the upcoming Blackwell products.
China Telecom recently announced that it has trained a large-scale language model using only its own computing infrastructure, likely using Huawei servers.
– Simon Sherwood
Big Tech announces $9.5 billion in spending on APAC data centers
The tech giant last week announced investments totaling $10.5 billion in data centers across Asia.
Google held a groundbreaking ceremony for a $2 billion data center and cloud region in Malaysia, and later announced a $1 billion cloud and data center infrastructure in Bangkok.
Oracle then announced a $6.5 billion commitment to open a public cloud region in Malaysia, making a big splash.
“The planned public cloud region will help Malaysian organizations modernize applications, move all types of workloads to the cloud, and innovate with data, analytics, and AI,” Oracle said in a statement. .
Vietnam is a “key player” in cybersecurity
The Singapore-based Southeast Asia research institute ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute investigated Vietnam’s cyber security and found that it is actually quite good.
According to the institute, “Vietnam has emerged as an important player in the field of cybersecurity and has made remarkable achievements in digital transformation.”
Vietnam’s position stems from the ruling Communist Party’s desire to protect itself and counter anti-government sentiment. National defense is another reason for the country’s excellence, and protecting socio-economic development is also a priority for the government, especially in the context of territorial disputes with China.
According to the report, Vietnam aims to transition to a high-income developed country by 2045 and has set a goal of becoming an upper middle-income economy by 2030, and digital infrastructure is essential for digital transformation. He says he is aware of something.
This has led to significant investments in broadband communications networks, undersea cables, data centers and cloud computing services.
India launches GenAI in regional languages
Last week, India announced BharatGen, an initiative to make generative AI available in multiple local languages.
India’s Ministry of Science and Technology said the government-funded multimodal large-scale language model (LLM) project is expected to be completed within two years.
“BharatGen will provide generative AI models and their applications as public goods by prioritizing India’s socio-cultural and linguistic diversity,” the ministry said, adding that by prioritizing India’s socio-cultural and linguistic diversity, ” “India’s control over digital resources and narratives will be strengthened,” it added.
Philippines enacts digital services tax
Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. last week signed into law a law forcing digital services to pay a 12 percent value-added tax (VAT). That means cloud services, online marketplaces, streaming platforms and other services will have to add the tax to their revenue. I grew up in the countryside.
The new VAT is expected to generate 105 billion pesos ($1.85 billion) in additional government revenue in the first five years. These revenues are promised to fund the construction of 42,000 classrooms, 6,000 rural health units and 7,000 kilometers of farm-to-market roads.
President Marcos emphasized that the law is not a new tax, but rather strengthens the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s (BIR) revenue-raising capacity.
Non-resident providers of digital services with an annual turnover of more than 3 million pesos ($53,000) must register with the BIR and appoint a domestic tax representative. Failure to do so may result in suspension of operations.
APAC Deal Book
Recent partnerships and deals spotted across the region by The Register last week include:
Toyota Motor Corporation announced it will invest $500 million in California-based electric air taxi company Joby Aviation to support certification and commercial production of Joby’s commercial passenger service vehicles. This brings Toyota’s total investment in Joby to $894 million over nearly seven years. Fujitsu Learning Media, the Japanese tech giant’s talent development arm, has revealed it has partnered with LinkedIn to provide talent development “for the age of AI.” Imperial College London’s AI accelerator spinout Heronic Technologies is in strategic discussions with Japanese semiconductor giant ROHM to develop power semiconductor materials and explore next-generation technologies including AI, photonics, spintronics and quantum solutions. has started.
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