As the global race to build "sovereign AI" gains momentum, Southeast Asia is carving out a strategic role in the next wave of digital infrastructure, and the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ) is emerging as a focal point. High-profile moves, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's recent visit to the Middle East, have spotlighted the growing link between AI innovation and national policy. In Southeast Asia, JS SEZ is becoming a real-world testbed for how governments can work together to support AI-powered industries.

MediaTek Research, the advanced research division of the MediaTek Group, has released MR Breeze ASR 25, an open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) model optimized for Taiwanese Mandarin and local speech patterns. Based on OpenAI's Whisper architecture, the model was designed to better understand the linguistic nuances of Taiwan, including Mandarin-English code-switching, a common feature in everyday speech.