The latest technology news from across Asia-Pacific
Entry-level mechanical watches from Hamilton, Orient, and Seiko are finding an audience among buyers tired of smartwatch obsolescence. The trend mirrors the mechanical keyboard movement - people paying for objects that don't need charging. Worth noting: this is a consumer preference shift, not a technology story.
Oracle is raising up to $50B in 2026 through a mix of debt and equity to expand OCI data centers, banking on contracts with Meta, OpenAI, NVIDIA, and xAI. The move signals hyperscaler demand is outpacing existing cloud capacity - and that Oracle sees an opening against AWS and Azure in AI infrastructure.
Apple executives are questioning whether the company has what it takes to compete in an AI-first era, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The introspection comes as memory chip suppliers prioritize AI training infrastructure over consumer electronics—a shift that could complicate Apple's hardware roadmap.
TikTok's 220 million U.S. users lost service for a week after a snowstorm knocked out Oracle-operated data centers. The timing - during TikTok's handover to new U.S. owners - raises questions about infrastructure resilience and single points of failure at scale.
Seoul's planning to put Maeumi, a Korean AI chatbot, on its suicide prevention hotline for initial triage before human counselors. This matters because it's a public sector bet on AI crisis intervention that U.S. companies are running from after liability settlements.
Anthropic's analysis of 1.5 million Claude conversations identifies patterns where AI assistants generate false information users believe, reinforce harmful beliefs, or script value-laden decisions verbatim. Reality distortion occurs roughly once per 1,300 interactions—low in percentage terms, significant at scale. Concerning: disempowerment patterns increased between late 2024 and late 2025.
French IT giant Capgemini will sell off its US government arm following revelations it held a contract to provide skip-tracing services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The subsidiary represents 0.4% of group revenue but triggered pressure from French officials and unions after fatal ICE shootings in Minneapolis.
D-Wave completed its acquisition of Yale spinout Quantum Circuits for $550M on January 20, adding error-corrected gate-model quantum systems to its commercial annealing platform. The move positions D-Wave as the only vendor offering both quantum approaches, with gate systems targeting 2026 availability alongside $30M in recent enterprise deals.
Major AI conferences including ICML and ICLR are enforcing strict policies against LLM-generated paper text, allowing editing use only. The move follows exponential growth in AI paper submissions—83% of top-cited 2023 papers focused on LLMs—that's overwhelming peer review capacity and enabling low-quality 'AI slop' submissions.
The EU's Destination Earth initiative has quietly operationalized its climate digital twin, reaching 5,000+ users and 30+ services by 2024. Phase 3 expansion begins July 2026, targeting a full Earth twin by 2030. The real question: can 5-10km resolution projections translate to actual policy changes?
The EU's government satcom program went operational January 14, pooling capacity from existing national GEO satellites across five member states. It's a bridge to IRIS², the 290-satellite constellation now targeting 2029 instead of 2030. The real test: whether shared capacity holds up during actual crises.
Security researchers documented 230 malicious OpenClaw "skills" disguised as crypto trading tools uploaded to ClawHub since late January. The extensions exploit OpenClaw's unsandboxed architecture to steal browser data and cryptocurrency information. Enterprise deployments are exposed: hundreds of instances run online without authentication.