The chip ceiling that wasn’t

Insight: The 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai was less a trade show and more a geopolitical statement. President Xi Jinping's keynote set the tone: Beijing is treating AI not as a sector bet but as a national strategic imperative. China used the occasion to announce a new international AI alliance aimed at shaping global AI governance standards when the U.S. and EU are still writing their own rules. The backdrop made the timing of Kimi K3 more striking — Moonshot AI had dropped the model just the day before: the largest open-source model by parameter count globally, and a release that sent Western observers scrambling to assess what China's AI output had become.

Impact: The instinct to call this another DeepSeek moment is understandable, but the parallel only holds partway. Kimi K3 is genuinely competitive: early benchmarks put it on par with Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on several measures, and its performance-to-cost ratio is strong enough to unsettle Western labs that have staked their investment thesis on a "compute moat." While K3 still falls short of the true frontier models such as Anthropic's Fable 5, the real story is structural: a 300-person startup under chip export controls built a frontier-competitive model, shaking the assumption that compute scarcity would constrain China's AI ambitions. With Beijing now pushing to set global AI governance standards, the competition is unfolding on two fronts: technical and institutional. 

Hong Kong’s stock exchange is weighing a move to start equities trading at 8:30am and scrap the one-hour midday lunch break, aligning trading hours with global markets. An after-hours session to capture early U.S. activity is also under consideration. This proposal comes as Hong Kong rides a wave of strong listing activity and market momentum, reflecting the city’s push to enhance its competitiveness as a global financial hub.

Insight: According to Google's inaugural Gemini Southeast Asia Report, one of the most striking things about how Southeast Asians use AI is how they’re now speaking to it. Users are increasingly interacting with Gemini in their native languages, with those in Vietnam and Indonesia topping the list in terms of non-English prompting at 89% and 87%, respectively. With Gemini usage having more than doubled across the region in the past year, it appears that the platform is adapting to the multicultural realities of one of the world's most linguistically diverse – and fragmented – regions.

Impact: Early waves of digitalization across the region rewarded those fluent in English. This led to the assumption during the early days of the AI race that language would create natural markets (with high barriers to entry) for domestic LLMs that were better attuned to cultural and linguistic nuance. As major models become increasingly multilingual, however, they lower barriers to adoption for millions of users while eroding the local-language advantage that once distinguished domestic LLMs. As that advantage becomes commoditized, local AI champions will need to prove their value through other forms of differentiation. 

Insight: The Cool Japan Fund, a public-private investment fund established in 2013 to promote Japanese cultural exports, may begin talks this month on restructuring or dissolution. Despite a mandate focused on content, only 30% of its 204 billion yen in investments went to media and content, with the rest scattered across lifestyle brands, department stores and unrelated sectors. Poor bets included Anime Consortium Japan, which collapsed after two and a half years against competition from global streaming platforms, and Spiber, a bio-fiber startup that entered an out-of-court debt workout in March. Cumulative losses reached 54 billion yen ($332 million) in fiscal 2025, with a recovery rate of just 60%. 

Impact: Cool Japan's failure reflects a structural problem common to public-private funds: a mandate too broad, too little industry expertise, and an incentive structure that attracted projects the private sector had already rejected. The timing is awkward. Prime Minister Takaichi's new growth strategy, announced in June, targets ¥370 trillion in public and private investment by fiscal 2040 across 17 strategic sectors and 62 designated products and technologies, with content industries among them. Whether Tokyo has drawn the right lessons from Cool Japan remains to be seen.

My Neighbour, The Dictator recounts Javanese-British author Tari Lang’s coming of age in Jakarta during Suharto’s reign. With her parents repeatedly imprisoned for their political beliefs, Lang experienced the upheaval not as a distant national crisis, but through the disruption of family life, the disappearance of friends, and the contrast between outward normality and underlying repression. The memoir feels especially timely as familiar political tensions re-emerge in Indonesia. Lang delayed publication following the deadly anti-government protests of 2025, amid growing scrutiny of the military’s expanding role, the treatment of dissent, and signs of democratic backsliding under President Prabowo. The book does not suggest that Indonesia is simply returning to the New Order, but its central warning feels pointed: authoritarianism rarely arrives in one dramatic moment; it advances through small accommodations, silences, and the gradual normalisation of what once seemed unthinkable.

Read more about the book here.