The inside story on the Asia tech trends that matter, from Nikkei Asia and the Financial Times
Hello, everyone! This is Lauly, your host for this week's #techAsia. I just came back from a weekend trip with my college friends to the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan, my favorite one on this island. Tech industry people know it as the place where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. produces its cutting-edge chips, but the city is also a beautiful place where four centuries of history and modernity seamlessly intertwine.
It has Taiwan's highest density of temples -- more than 1,500 -- many of which were built in the 17th and 18th centuries. Wandering the city's lanes and alleys, it is easy to pass by small temples built in the Ming or Qing dynasties. Hipster cafes and bars (really, really good bars) are often remodeled from old houses and are hidden gems. Food is of course the soul of Tainan. I once tried having 10 iconic local dishes in eight hours, such as beef soup, seafood congee and danzai noodles. I felt like my stomach would burst, but I was content.
During this trip, I was surprised that my longtime friends talked with me about the stock market, a topic they never cared about before. The Taiwanese bourse recently exceeded those of Canada and the U.K. to become the world's 6th-largest by value. Driven by AI, the market has been lifted by so many tech stocks that trading has almost become a national pastime.
I am not exaggerating. Taiwan's individual investors accounted for more than 50% of trading in the first quarter of this year. While grabbing lunch in Taipei last week, two ladies sitting next to me were talking about how they had just bought shares in Delta, a key Nvidia thermal and power supply provider. Yesterday, as I was standing on the street next to a pepper cake stand waiting for my taxi, the owner and a customer were predicting that the stock price of Nan Ya Plastics, a chip and printed circuit board materials supplier, would hit 120 New Taiwan dollars. It is around NT$90 now. A year ago it was NT$26.
On Monday, the Taiwan Stock Exchange index reached a record high of 40,000 points, a huge contrast compared with around 8,000 a decade ago. I still remember doorstepping Terry Gou, Foxconn's founder and former chairman, while he was visiting his first wife's family cemetery in the mountains, and he complained that if the Taiwanese government continued doing nothing, the stock market would collapse and become irrelevant. I'm glad Gou's prophecy did not come to pass.
All my recent conversations with industry sources have also touched on the stock market. Some sources have described the situation as bittersweet. On the one hand, they continue to be haunted by the shortages of memory chips, central processing units, or CPUs, and materials, and are worried that rising prices for everything could drag down overall electronics demand for the rest of the year. On the other hand, they couldn't be happier about their personal gains in the stock market.
It sounds like a bit of a disconnect between the market boom and reality, but I get it.
China is Apple's largest market in Asia and its biggest manufacturing hub in the world. As such, the country will present a major challenge for the American tech giant's new CEO, John Ternus, write Nikkei Asia's Yifan Yu, Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li.
Sales of its iconic iPhones in China have finally bounced back, but at the same time, Apple faces mounting geopolitical pressure and is struggling to shift its supply chain away from its longtime hub.
Ternus will also have to grapple with a global memory chip and materials shortage, Apple's lack of a clear AI strategy, geopolitical uncertainties including the Iran war and U.S.-China tensions, and the global macroeconomic slowdown.
Sources say Ternus is unlikely to accelerate the supply chain shift in the next 12 months, partly to ensure a smooth leadership transition but also due to difficulties it has run into elsewhere, primarily in India.
The White House has accused China of undertaking industrial-scale theft of American AI labs' intellectual property and warned that it would crack down on a practice that exploits U.S. innovation, write the Financial Times' Demetri Sevastopulo and Cristina Criddle.
"The U.S. government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems," Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo seen by the FT.
The accusation marks the latest escalation in tensions around Chinese groups allegedly raiding advanced American AI research amid an arms race to lead in the technology. It comes just weeks before President Donald Trump will meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
The issue gained attention after China's DeepSeek was accused of using distillation -- the process of training smaller AI models based on the output of larger ones -- to build a powerful product at a lower cost.
Kratsios's memo to government departments said the administration would share information with American AI companies about "attempts by foreign actors to conduct unauthorized, industrial-scale distillation" and help them coordinate against attacks.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said the White House accusations were "pure slander."
"China has always been committed to promoting scientific and technological progress through cooperation and healthy competition," said Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson. "China attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights."
China's decision to block Meta's acquisition of Chinese AI startup Manus will have a chilling effect on cross-border, technology-intensive deals, as well as on China-born entrepreneurs, according to this piece by Nikkei Asia's Cissy Zhou and Yifan Yu.
