Applied Materials is expanding manufacturing and research in Singapore as artificial intelligence (AI) drives a wider shift in semiconductor planning, supply chains, and investment. The move highlights how AI demand is influencing chipmakers, equipment suppliers, and global customers, with implications for production capacity, regional innovation hubs, and technology markets worldwide.

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.

Optical communications maker PCL Technologies is expanding into high-power laser packaging, with its new Malaysia plant on track to pass customer certification by the end of 2026. Its earlier investment in US silicon photonics firm Skorpios and the acquisition of Pingood Enterprise also form part of the group's co-packaged optics (CPO) strategy.

During its first quarter 2026 earnings call, VinFast Auto Ltd. unveiled a series of significant corporate moves, including a transition in board leadership, a major restructuring of its manufacturing assets, and the expansion of high-tech partnerships focused on autonomous mobility. These developments signal the company's shift toward a "capital-light" business model that prioritizes research and development (R&D) and brand growth over capital-intensive manufacturing.

Vietnam-based electric vehicle maker VinFast reported strong revenue and delivery growth in the first quarter of 2026, but its financial results showed that losses continued to widen significantly as the company pursues aggressive global expansion.

ASRock Rack, a subsidiary of Pegatron Group's ASRock Inc., has won an order to supply 587 GPU servers equipped with Nvidia B200 accelerators to Japan-based AI infrastructure provider Datasection Inc., the two firms announced. The systems are contracted for deployment at Datasection's AI data center near Bangkok, Thailand, and will serve as a dedicated high-performance computing platform for US companies.

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.