Regional

AI News Brief: Honda has begun using AI to assist with vehicle body design, cutting the traditional five-year development cycle down to about three years. The initiative is led by an internal Honda team that’s bringing AI into the vehicle design process, while trying to fold the company’s long-standing emphasis on open brainstorming discussions into the AI-assisted design workflow, rather than letting AI replace the team’s collective discussion process. Overall, this is a concrete case of Honda adopting AI tools…

AI news brief: a Traditional Chinese summary of this Australia/Japan quantum tech fund news. Daiwa Corporate Investment, a unit of Japan’s Daiwa Securities Group, has announced a partnership with an Australian VC firm to launch a new fund targeting key Australian companies in quantum tech and food tech. The new fund, named ‘Sakura Fund,’ plans to raise $143 million this year…

AI news brief: Sony Group plans to launch an in-car AI agent service as early as fiscal year 2027, paired with an original mascot character, aiming to grab a share of the emerging in-car entertainment market as the self-driving era approaches. The character is named Wichef, a talking rabbit-sheep mascot designed by Sony specifically for AI applications. As self-driving tech advances, drivers will shift from operating the vehicle to being passengers, creating demand for in-car entertainment and interaction — and Sony wants this approachable virtual character to stake out that market position.

AI News Flash: Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is pushing to build a data-sharing platform that uses AI to analyze data provided by manufacturers, aiming to speed up new materials development by 10x. According to Nikkei, the platform is expected to launch in fiscal year 2027. The move reflects growing adoption of AI-driven discovery of new chemical compositions across the materials industry. See the original article for details.

AI news flash: Shares of Alibaba Group listed in Hong Kong plunged in early trading on Monday, after the company announced the prior trading day that it would raise HK$80 billion (about $10.2 billion) through a new share placement to fund its AI-related investments. This comes as competition between China and Western camps over frontier large models and the underlying compute infrastructure buildout keeps heating up. Alibaba’s decision to double down on AI at this moment shows the company is betting big on…

AI News Brief: As the global AI boom keeps gathering steam, exchanges in Singapore and Thailand are moving to capture the trend, rolling out new measures to attract tech listings and stay competitive in regional capital markets. The report quotes SET President Asadej Kongsiri and SGX CEO Michael Syn on their respective strategies.

AI News Flash: CCSH (parent company of Yangtze Memory Technologies/YMTC) announced Friday that it plans to list on Shanghai’s STAR Market, aiming to raise at least RMB 33 billion (roughly $4.9 billion). CCSH’s YMTC is China’s leading memory chip maker and has climbed to become the world’s third-largest NAND flash memory manufacturer. The IPO plan comes as the AI boom drives strong earnings growth for data center suppliers, with memory chip demand rising alongside expanding AI infrastructure.

AI News Flash: Samsung announced it will return up to 110 trillion won (about $79 billion) to shareholders, highlighting the semiconductor giant’s dilemma of rewarding investors while pouring massive capital into the AI race to stay competitive. The shareholder return plan comes after Samsung’s stock slid on market fears of oversupply in memory chips, with investors worried that expanding memory capacity could lead to a supply glut and push prices down. Notably, Samsung’s semiconductor division posted record operating profit in the April-June 2026 quarter, showing that despite concerns about oversupply, AI-related demand (like high-bandwidth memory, HBM) is still driving strong earnings.

AI news brief: Taiwan stock market data staleness false alarms recently gave a glimpse into the spread of cross-border scams across Southeast Asia. Nikkei Asia (Tokyo/Hanoi) reports that AI is helping scam networks and other cross-border criminal groups in Southeast Asia cut operating costs and scale up, creating a game of whack-a-mole. Under U.S. pressure, Cambodia has launched a major crackdown on scam compounds within its borders, forcing some scam operations to shut down or relocate—but these groups haven’t disappeared, they’ve just resettled in other countries like Sri Lanka to keep operating.

AI News Flash: Foreign ownership of Japanese stocks hit a fresh record for the third straight fiscal year in FY2026, with overseas investors now holding more than a third of all Japanese shares. The biggest gains clustered around two groups: AI-related companies and stocks targeted by activist investors. The report notes that improving corporate governance in Japan is the main driver pulling in more activist investment, suggesting foreign interest in Japanese equities isn’t just about AI-driven growth potential — it’s also about the improved shareholder value expectations that come with more transparent governance.