Sam Altman's vision of artificial intelligence as a utility bought by the meter — like electricity — may be the wrong model entirely, and the telecommunications industry's last decade shows why. Benedict Evans, the technology analyst and former Andreessen Horowitz partner, made that case Wednesday in the second keynote of SuperAI Singapore 2026, drawing on mobile data's growth trajectory to argue that volume and valuation do not travel together in commodity infrastructure businesses

ByteDance's enterprise technology arm took a direct shot at Anthropic and OpenAI's coding tools at SuperAI Singapore 2026 on Wednesday, with Kan Yang, head of solutions at BytePlus, naming Claude Code and Codex as competitors to ByteDance's own agentic engineering product, Trae

The economics of closed artificial intelligence (AI) models may be fundamentally broken, and the centralized cloud infrastructure supporting them is the next target — that was the sharpest argument to emerge from the opening keynote of SuperAI Singapore 2026 on Wednesday, where entrepreneur and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan laid out a case for why the software industry may have no choice but to decentralize

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has once again called on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to establish a regional power grid, as geopolitical developments and growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure simultaneously affect energy supply and demand

Malaysia's electronics sector is expected to keep expanding into 2026, even as tariffs, geopolitical tensions, and rising input costs weigh on manufacturers. Industry leaders say the country's neutral position in the US-China contest, along with a deepening semiconductor ecosystem, should help sustain export growth for global supply chains

Below are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories from the week of May 25-31, 2026

Nvidia's expanding recruitment activity in Vietnam signals a potential shift in the country's role within advanced AI infrastructure manufacturing, as Taiwanese server and EMS players continue to scale up production capacity in the region. The developments underscore Vietnam's growing importance in the global reconfiguration of AI hardware supply chains, particularly for high-end data-center systems and GPU-based servers

Oppstar Bhd has restructured the delivery framework of an artificial intelligence chip development project with a Yokohama-based client, replacing an earlier tripartite arrangement with separate design services agreements and formalizing a US$2.9 million contract for its engineering scope, according to The Edge Malaysia

ByteDance is considering a sharp increase in capital spending this year as the TikTok owner pushes deeper into artificial intelligence infrastructure — a move that could make it one of China's most aggressive investors in data centers, servers, and custom chips

Vietnamese electric-vehicle maker VinFast has appointed a new chairman amid mounting challenges in its overseas expansion across Asia and the US, including delays to its planned US factory, rising losses, and intensifying competition in global EV markets

TECO Electric & Machinery announced on the 25th that it signed an agreement to acquire about 78% of Malaysian engineering firm Dynaciate Engineering Sdn. Bhd. for roughly 200 million ringgit (about NT$1.6 billion). The closing was targeted by the end of August and the firm said the move is intended to expand TECO's data center infrastructure footprint in Southeast Asia to serve global cloud service provider customers

Singapore will launch a new testbed at the Punggol Digital District (PDD) later in 2026 to research, test, and deploy physical artificial intelligence (AI) systems, as the government seeks to accelerate the adoption of robotics and embodied AI in real-world environments. The initiative is being led by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), JTC, and the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) in collaboration with eight industry partners

Google and OpenAI's expanded cooperation with Singapore aims to accelerate AI adoption, workforce training, and safety measures, providing a model for other countries. The moves could shape global AI policy, talent flows, and public-sector deployment by showing how major tech firms partner with a small, strategically positioned city-state and innovation

Vietnam has issued artificial intelligence (AI) regulations requiring companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to appoint representatives to communicate with the government, with affected firms needing to comply by March 2027