Apple's incoming chief executive confronts a web of diplomatic, political, and regulatory challenges that will test the company's ability to manage relationships with world leaders and regulators, and could influence decisions on trade and antitrust disputes.

Meta and Amazon announced on April 24 that Meta will use Graviton5 CPUs made by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The deal illustrates the growing importance of CPU chips for increasingly complex compute tasks as AI technology makes the leap from model training to autonomous agents.

Global cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to expand their procurement of AI servers from Taiwan, while high-end GPUs and TPUs manufactured by TSMC are in short supply. Analysts say AI will become as ubiquitous as electricity and the Internet, extending beyond cloud computing into appliances, automobiles, and robotics.

China warned on April 27, 2026, that it would take countermeasures if the EU's proposed Industrial Accelerator Act harms Chinese companies — a move with potential global trade and investment implications as Brussels seeks to shore up domestic manufacturing amid green transition goals.

"Singapore-washing" — the tactic of Chinese technology firms re-domiciling in the city-state to bypass geopolitical scrutiny — is facing an existential threat. China has moved to implement aggressive new capital controls following a multi-agency probe into Meta's US$2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus. Bloomberg reports that Chinese officials have categorized the deal as a "leakage" of sensitive homegrown technology to a geopolitical rival.

South Korea's Naver Cloud and construction project management firm HanmiGlobal have formed a strategic alliance to jointly pursue large-scale data center projects overseas, with a particular focus on Saudi Arabia and other emerging markets.

Quanta Computer is doubling down on speed, scale, and execution as it heads into 2026, with leadership expressing strong confidence that surging AI server demand will drive another year of record growth, even amid global uncertainty. At Quanta's 38th anniversary celebration, Vice Chairman C.C. Leung emphasized the company's ability to meet increasingly demanding customer expectations. Orders are not only growing in volume, he noted, but also require faster delivery and lower costs. Despite operating at full capacity, he stressed that the company continues to seek even more orders and growth opportunities.

DeepSeek's 90% cut to fees for input cache hit, which occurs when the model reuses previously computed results for identical or similar inputs instead of recomputing them, across its API lineup could lower operational costs for global developers and enterprises, especially for long-text and high-frequency applications, potentially accelerating the adoption of locally developed large language models, intensifying price competition with international providers, and reducing barriers to AI-powered services worldwide.

Below are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories from the week of April 20-27, 2026:

South Korea and Vietnam have expanded cooperation across technology, energy, and infrastructure, signing dozens of agreements during Korean President Lee Jae-Myung's visit to Hanoi, as both countries seek to reinforce supply chain resilience amid global volatility.