Regional

AI News Brief: Semiconductor and AI concept stocks saw heavy selling on the 17th (Taiwan time), with the Nikkei plunging over 4,100 points intraday. Memory giant Kioxia Holdings led the decline, plunging 16% in a single day. The primary driver of this selloff was investors unwinding previously accumulated leveraged positions in tech stocks, coupled with growing concerns about whether the current AI-driven bull run can be sustained. Asian markets broadly weakened, led by AI proxy stocks…

AI news flash: AI concept stocks tumbled across the board on Friday, with Japanese memory giant Kioxia Holdings plunging 16% intraday to hit the daily limit down, making it one of the deepest losers in this selloff wave. This decline isn’t driven by any single company’s fundamental deterioration — instead, investors are unwinding previously accumulated leveraged positions in tech stocks, and the market is now questioning whether this AI-driven bull run can be sustained.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the World AI Conference in Shanghai on Friday, calling on developing countries to strengthen cooperation in artificial intelligence to narrow the international technology gap, while Beijing used this major domestic tech event to showcase its technological ambitions to global audiences. The forum carried a clear ‘AI diplomacy’ tone, with Xi posing for group photos alongside Thai PM Anutin Charnvirakul, Cambodian PM Hun Manet, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the opening ceremony.

AI News Brief: 44 Japanese companies jointly launched a sovereign AI foundation model development plan on July 16, led by SoftBank, Sony, and Honda, aiming to train proprietary AI with their own data to safeguard Japan’s manufacturing position in global competition amid the widening US-China gap in frontier AI. The plan has partnered with NVIDIA, with Tokyo procuring 27,500 Rubin chips to support ‘physical AI’ R&D in robotics, factory automation, and real-world interaction applications rather than cloud-based language models.

AI News Brief: ASEAN has favorable conditions for deploying AI humanoid robots in manufacturing and logistics centers, according to a senior AI industry executive speaking at a panel discussion at the Nikkei Asia Forum APAC 2026 in Bangkok on July 16. The executive noted that the prevalence of manual labor in Southeast Asia actually creates a favorable data collection environment — abundant repetitive human work scenarios provide rich sources of motion and perception data needed to train humanoid robots, accelerating AI robot deployment in local manufacturing and logistics settings. Humanoid robots performed a dancing demo on-site as part of the technology showcase. The original summary did not provide specific deployment timelines, investment scale, or partner details; see the original link for full coverage.

AI News Brief: Nvidia announced a partnership with Toyota Motor’s smart city experimental project ‘Woven City’ (operated by Woven by Toyota), focused on ‘physical AI’ technologies. Woven City is a demonstration experimental city built by Toyota in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, used to test various smart city and future mobility technologies. Accor…

Taiwan is accelerating its homegrown generative AI model TAIDE to protect local language and culture, countering how mainstream models tend to skew toward mainland Chinese phrasing and values because their training data is heavy on mainland Chinese content. TAIDE is built on an open-source base model, then layered with Taiwan-specific data for training and fine-tuning.

AI news brief: Japanese drone stocks have surged on military demand, with capital rotating from traditional defense names that already rallied last year toward the drone supply chain, which hasn’t been fully priced in yet. The backdrop: investors are hunting for diversified growth themes beyond AI stocks, so they’re shifting their gaze from traditional defense to this relatively new military-industrial sub-sector. See the original link for detailed mechanics, specific names, and capital scale involved. …

AI News Brief: Kawasaki Heavy Industries has announced a partnership with US chip giant Nvidia to co-develop the next generation of ‘AI-driven shipyards,’ aiming to leverage Nvidia’s digital twin (digital twin) technology to boost production efficiency and address the chronic labor shortage facing Japan’s shipbuilding industry. Beyond building AI-centric smart shipyards…

AI News Brief: Nvidia GPU server prices are too high, driving up infrastructure costs for Japanese AI companies and pushing the industry to look for cheaper alternatives. There are two main directions right now: first, adopting NPU (Neural Processing Unit) semiconductor chips to replace or complement GPUs — for example, the NPU developed by Korean chip startup Rebellions is already being used in some AI data center servers; second, offloading compute and data access load through cache servers instead of simply piling on more GPUs.