China tries to centralise cloud computing - Asian Tech Roundup

Plus: The world’s first zero carbon datacentre?

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Most of China’s newest datacentres are in the unpopulated western regions where power is cheap – but latency is holding back adoption

Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at China’s datacentre glut, a near-zero-carbon facility and a serious cyberattack in Singapore.

At a time when countries worldwide are rushing to build datacentres to power the AI boom (which might already be slowing), China has an unusual problem: excess capacity.

Driven by the ‘Eastern Data, Western Computing’ strategy startups rushed to build new datacentres, especially in western China where power is cheap. However, that led to high latency for consumers in the more populated eastern regions, and the facilities are now estimated to have a 20-30% demand shortfall. More than 100 projects have been scrapped.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission is now moving to regulate the sector more closely, with the goal of filtering out low-quality facilities. At the same time, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is looking to create a new centralised cloud platform that will aggregate spare capacity into a national network.

The lofty goal is held back by technical limitations like the aforementioned latency issue, as well as different architectures that don’t play well together (like Nvidia GPUs and the CUDA stack versus Huawei GPUs and the CANN stack).

At the same time, tech firm Hailanyun has launched a new underwater datacentre off the coast of Shanghai, cooled by seawater and running using 97% renewable energy.

Australia

More than 3.5 million records belonging to fashion brand SABO have been found online in an unencrypted and non-password-protected database, which held potentially sensitive information including names, addresses and phone numbers. Source

China

China is looking to centralise computing power and tame the spread of datacentres in the country after a three-year building boom. Source
Chinese tech firm Hailanyun has launched an underwater AI data centre off the coast of Shanghai. The facility is cooled with seawater circulated through radiator-equipped racks and powered almost entirely by a nearby offshore wind farm. The datacentre is possibly the first example of an almost-zero-carbon facility. Source
China’s Ministry of State Security has urged consumers and businesses to avoid foreign hardware because of the risk it may contain backdoors. Source
Chinese hackers have once again been targeting Tibetans around the event of the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday. Source.
Microsoft has accused two Chinese nation-state actors, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, of exploiting vulnerabilities in SharePoint. Source
Chinese startup Manus is challenging GPT4 with one-prompt creation of charts. Source
Around $1 billion worth of Nvidia B200 GPUs has been smuggled into China, despite export sanctions. Source

India

PayPal is signing deals with global wallet companies to create a platform called PayPal World, including India’s NPCI International Payments and China’s Tenpay Global, to simplify cross-border commerce. Source
Multinational companies including McDonalds and Bupa are turning to India to hire AI engineers to meet a shortfall in numbers. Source
India’s largest crypto exchange CoinDCX is reported to have lost around $44.2 million after an internal account was compromised. Source
Indian regulators have filed a complaint against Myntra, alleging the Walmart-owned ecommerce firm illegally disguised retail operations as wholesale trade. Source
Fintech company Paytm reported a 100% year-on-year (YoY) rise in revenues. Source.

Japan

Yahoo Japan has joined the growing list of companies mandating the use of generative AI by employees. The company expects a doubling of productivity within three years. Source
A Japanese company is planning the country’s first nuclear power station since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Source

Elsewhere in Asia

Singapore: The country is experiencing a “serious and ongoing” cyber-attack targeting its critical infrastructure. Minister for national security and home affairs, K Shanmugam, took the unusual step of calling out the attack and naming the attack group – UNC3886 – during a recent speech. Source
South Korea: The Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) has announced plans to build a permanent base on the Moon by 2045. Source
Pakistan: The world’s largest EV maker, China’s BYD, is to begin assembling automobiles in Pakistan. Source
Nepal: Telegram has been blocked in Nepal over allegations that it supports money laundering. Source
North Korea: A women in Arizona has been sentenced to eight and a half years in jail over her role in helping North Korean operatives pose as US-based remote workers. Source