AI

Vietnam and Singapore will deepen cooperation in technological areas, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technology, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and the data economy.

NVIDIA proposed four areas of AI cooperation to Vietnam, including helping the country build its own large language model and expand its computing capacity, said Vikram Rao, NVIDIA's vice-president for ASEAN.

In an interview, Ropedia Co-Founder and CTO Fangzhou Hong told TNGlobal about why Asia is emerging as a hub for Physical AI, how Singapore can take the lead, whether data or hardware will determine the winners, and how robots entering everyday life could reshape employment.

The share of Malaysian businesses that consistently use at least one AI tool rose to 38 percent from 27 percent a year earlier, according to "Unlocking Malaysia's AI Potential 2026" study commissioned by Amazon Web Services, though most remain limited to basic applications.

Chinese payments and digital-services company Alipay launched China's first full-stack agentic commerce platform, giving merchants tools to move from digital operations to services run by AI agents, at a partner conference in Hangzhou.

The share of Singapore enterprises using agentic AI tools more than doubled to 51 percent in 2026 from 22 percent a year earlier, according to an annual survey by the United States-based workflow software firm ServiceNow.

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Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, NVIDIA, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), and the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs have launched the UGM Indosat NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC), Indonesia's first university-based AI technology center.

Manus, a Singapore-headquartered AI agent startup founded in China, will return to operating as an independent company and delete some user data, months after Chinese regulators blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the startup.

Around one in five employees in ASEAN lose more than seven hours a week moving information and reconciling data between disconnected systems, even as 86 percent say AI has improved their day-to-day work experience.