Analysis
In-depth analysis of the forces shaping AI and technology in Asia.
All Three Majors Are Now Suing Anthropic. The AI Copyright Endgame Is Taking Shape
Sony and Warner's new lawsuit — naming Dario Amodei personally — completes the music industry's encirclement of Anthropic, while the chaotic payout of the $1.5 billion book settlement previews what an AI licensing regime will actually look like.
The Backlash Has Arrived: Asia's Data Center Boom Is Colliding With the People Who Live Next Door
From preschool parents in rural Australia to grid politics in India and Malaysia, public resistance to AI data centers is emerging as the binding constraint on Asia's compute buildout — and operators are unprepared for it.
Groq, Nemotron, Now Hugging Face: Nvidia Isn't Buying Companies — It's Buying the Open AI Ecosystem
The $13 billion Hugging Face deal completes a vertical stack from silicon to model distribution. What Nvidia gains, what 'open' means when it has an owner, and why China's PyTorch play landed the same week.
The Cost War: How Moonshot, Z.ai and DeepSeek Are Beating US Labs on Price — and Why It Works
Chinese frontier labs now ship models within striking distance of the US frontier at a tenth of the price. The strategy isn't charity — it's a deliberate play for the world's developer mindshare, and it's winning.
From 40% to 8%: How Huawei's Ascend 950 Is Ending Nvidia's China Era
Bernstein forecasts Nvidia's China AI chip share will collapse to single digits in 2026 while Huawei climbs toward 50%. The story behind the numbers is a state-orchestrated industrial substitution unfolding faster than almost anyone predicted.
Broadcom's $16.7 Billion Quarter Is the Clearest Signal Yet That the GPU Monoculture Is Over
Custom accelerators now make up 73% of Broadcom's AI revenue, and the company sees $230 billion by 2028. The hyperscalers' defection from merchant GPUs is no longer a hedge — it's the plan.
The Security Split: How One Breach Redrew the AI Industry's Battle Lines
In a single week, the industry sorted itself into open and closed camps — an alliance without the frontier labs, a letter without Anthropic, and a fight over whether transparency or control makes AI safe.
China's Embodied AI Machine: Record Robotics Funding Meets an IPO Assembly Line
Robotics startups have raised $18.8 billion in 2026 — already beating any full year on record — with Chinese humanoid makers leading the surge and a public-listing pipeline forming behind them.
A 557% Profit Surge That Counts as a Miss: What SK Hynix's Quarter Reveals About the AI Trade
The memory supercycle just passed its first genuine credibility test — but the way it passed tells us the market has stopped pricing earnings and started pricing the durability of the boom itself.
The Meeting You Can't Get: China's Two-Track AI Diplomacy
In the same July that Beijing feted APEC ministers in Chengdu and launched a 29-nation AI body, China's top tech firms refused to meet a US congressional commission — a deliberate sorting of who gets access to Chinese AI, and on whose terms.
Unbundling the Token Factory: What AMD and Cerebras' Split-Inference Bet Means for the Nvidia Economy
The July 23 AMD-Cerebras pact splits inference into specialist stages and claims up to 5x tokens per watt — a sign that the metric of the buildout has shifted from chips to electricity, with real consequences for Asia's memory makers and model labs.
When the Vendor Co-Signs the Lease: Nvidia's $250 Billion Guarantee and the Circularity Problem
Nvidia is in talks to backstop $250 billion of OpenAI's Ohio data-center obligations — a sign that debt markets won't carry AI risk on their own, and that the loop now runs through SoftBank and Seoul.