Hi everyone! This is Cheng Ting-Fang, your #techAsia host for the week, sending a warm hello from Taipei!
I just returned to Asia from Barcelona — a city bursting with Gaudi’s artistic architecture and fresh tapas, from garlic prawns to grilled cuttlefish and patatas bravas. Every spring, the global wireless industry gathers in this Spanish city for the latest market insights. This year, the buzzword once again was “artificial intelligence.”
At the Mobile World Congress, I was able to try out various Chinese AI applications first-hand. There were long queues at the booth of telecom operator China Unicom, which showcased a photo station capable of instantly transforming snapshots into centuries-old historical figures — blending my face, for instance, with Empress Wu Zetian’s Tang Dynasty attire in the blink of an eye. The company said its own Yuanjing large language model was the engine behind this transformation.
Meanwhile, iFlytek — China’s top provider of speech-recognition tech — demonstrated a powerful tool (pictured above) that allows content creators to generate short movies from just a few words of input, selecting the genre and style on the go. In under 20 seconds, I found myself watching a Disney-Pixar-style animation about Barcelona, produced entirely by AI. China Mobile affiliate AsiaInfo — the nation’s leading telecom software provider — used a simple camera backed by its DeepSeek-enhanced AI language model and Nvidia chips to provide visitors with 30-second health checks by measuring their heartbeat and breathing rate.
Not everything was so futuristic, however. My colleague Lauly Li and I shared a two-bedroom suite with a large work table during the trip, but we endured three nights without hot water, forcing us to take showers in less than a minute, as well as two nights of disrupted underground transit. Despite these challenges, we were able to meet numerous industry executives and after catching the earliest flight back to Asia at 6am, were soon back home.
One of the most remarkable experiences last week was meeting with a US chip developer. Instead of sharing updates on his company, all the executive wanted to talk about was China. A Nikkei Asia reader, he unexpectedly began interviewing me about China’s chip capabilities and whether device makers are adopting these domestic solutions. “Do you think they are sustainable? Are companies really using their products? Why can they sell at such a low price?” It felt odd to be interviewed by my own interviewee, but it underlined how everyone in the industry is keen to assess China’s local chip push amid mounting AI competition.
The next big things
Besides AI, drones and humanoid robots are two of the top buzzwords in the tech industry as EVs and mobile phones slow down.
Nikkei Asia’s Kim Jaewon reports that Ukrainian and Israeli drone makers, with battlefield-proven experience, are now eyeing overseas markets — particularly South Korea, as the country aims to double its drone force against North Korean threats. Local players such as Korean Air and Pablo Air are also targeting this rapidly growing market. Globally, the drone market is set to grow fast, with the Korea Institute of Aviation Safety Technology projecting a 62.6 per cent increase from 2023 to nearly $55bn by 2030. Asia is the world’s largest drone market.
Humanoid robots, meanwhile, have emerged as a red-hot area since early this year, with TSMC’s CEO describing it as a key focus for future tech development. In March, Beijing named humanoid robots the next big thing after electric vehicles, while top US EV maker Tesla is among the big tech names developing its own humanoid project, Optimus.
But the technology is not fully mature. In an exclusive interview with US robot-making unicorn Agility Robotics, CEO Peggy Johnson said that ensuring humanoid robots are safe to work alongside humans is one of the top challenges the industry must overcome, Nikkei Asia’s Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li write. The CEO, a chip and tech industry veteran, also noted that there is currently insufficient real-time data to effectively train these systems.
Quiet cash
Wealthy Chinese investors are funnelling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk — including SpaceX and xAI — using an arrangement that shields their identities from public view, according to asset managers and investors involved in the transactions.
Since Musk was named a key figure in US President Donald Trump’s drive to remake the US government, China-based asset managers have been promoting the pair’s relationship as an enticement to raise capital from rich Chinese, writes the Financial Times’ Sun Yu.
The investments are being placed through opaque structures known as special-purpose vehicles, which have the benefit of concealing the investors’ identities, to avoid the ire of US authorities and companies wary of Chinese capital during a nadir in relations between the two countries.
Three Chinese-backed asset managers told the Financial Times that over the past two years, they had sold Chinese investors more than $30mn worth of shares in SpaceX, xAI and Neuralink, three Musk-controlled private technology companies whose valuations have surged.
The use of special-purpose vehicles in financing is commonplace and there is nothing illegal about the arrangements. But it raises concerns about the potential for undue influence and conflicts of interest at a time when Musk has unprecedented involvement in US policy, politics and business.
Representatives for Musk, SpaceX, xAI and Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment.
Lightbulb moment
Top Japanese telecom carrier NTT is betting big on fully optical communications, which it says can reduce AI data centres power consumption to one one-hundredth of current levels. But such a radical transformation faces many hurdles, Nikkei Asia’s Mitsuru Obe writes in this deep dive on the topic.
Dubbed the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network, NTT is hoping this technology will help the company — once the world’s most valuable — regain its former glory after decades of failing to commercialise other tech breakthroughs.
Optical transmission offers numerous advantages over the traditional electric copper wiring common in data centre servers. These include fast transmission speeds, lower latency, and markedly reduced power consumption. However, integrating optical components into every link of the data centre and eventually connecting or integrating them with CPUs and GPUs has a long way to go, particularly in terms of miniaturisation. Moreover, it remains uncertain whether global data centre builders, carriers and chipmakers will fully embrace a completely optical network.
A popular young Manus
China’s AI frenzy has found a new darling. Little-known Manus AI sparked significant excitement last week with its claim to have developed the world’s first “general AI agent,” Cissy Zhou of Nikkei Asia writes. According to the demo video released by Manus AI, their AI agent is capable of doing complicated tasks such as screening resumes, researching real estate and analysing stocks.
The developer says the agent’s performance surpasses ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s models across all three difficulty levels in the GAIA benchmark, though some sceptics suggest the buzz is more a marketing frenzy than a true technological breakthrough.
But with the government throwing its weight behind DeepSeek specifically and AI more generally, investors are piling into the sector despite some concerns about inflated expectations.
Suggested reads
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Grab ties up with Chinese, US companies on self-driving vehicles (Nikkei Asia)
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Elon Musk’s Starlink in tie-up with domestic tycoon to enter India (FT)
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Space station start-up aims for out-of-this-world drug ‘factories’ (Nikkei Asia)
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China’s delivery platforms compete to offer better worker benefits (FT)
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Coinbase to make comeback in India as opposition to crypto eases (FT)
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Apple’s struggles in China extend to earphones and tablets (Nikkei Asia)
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Pokémon Go developer Niantic to sell game business, with payout for Nintendo (Nikkei Asia)
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TSMC is ‘not afraid’ of losing US chip subsidies (FT)
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Trump tariff ‘bomb’ rattles South Korea’s chip and auto sectors (Nikkei Asia)
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TSMC plays its hand in Donald Trump’s tariff war (FT)
#techAsia is co-ordinated by Nikkei Asia’s Katherine Creel in Tokyo, with assistance from the FT tech desk in London.
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