Bollywood versus Big Tech - Asian Tech Roundup

Plus: Shamefaced Deloitte refunds Australia and Softbank doubles down on robots

Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at the global copyright battle between the movie business and AI, Deloitte’s expensive generative booboos, and SoftBank’s planned acquisition of ABB’s robot business

Keir Starmer has been on his travels again, this time to Mumbai, home of the world’s largest film industry, where he led a delegation of UK studio representatives in discussions about joint ventures with their Indian counterparts. Cut to the chase? Yash Raj Films, one of Bollywood’s biggest movie producers, will shoot three blockbusters on British soil next year for the first time in eight years. Cue press-released celebrations all round.

But away from the camera calls, Bollywood, and little brother Hollywood, face bigger decisions than shoot locations. Namely, what to do about AI.

AI companies and media producers are set for an almighty shootout over IP, and for the film industry, the second-biggest copyright battleground after the US- which seems a lost cause for the studios - is India. A panel of Indian lawyers, government officials and media executives is currently reviewing the country’s copyright law, under fierce lobbying pressure from both sides, with Indian filmmakers joined by their US counterparts in fighting for tighter controls.

The movie industry is worried that allowing AI companies to train models on all content would undermine its entire business model. In India, the business employs millions and generated $13.1 billion in revenue last year, at an annual growth rate of 18%.

But keen to ride the AI tiger, the Indian government and tech companies likely view Bollywood’s protestations as overly theatrical, seeing any restriction on data usage for model training as an unbearable impediment to competitiveness. $13.1 billion, they might argue, is small potatoes compared with what AI could bring.

So far, the Indian panel has kept schtum, promising to report on its deliberations in the coming weeks. A similar psychodrama is playing out in the UK.

Stay tuned folks.

Australia

• Consultancy Deloitte has agreed to partially refund the Australian government after a report it produced was found to be full of AI-authored hallucinations. Source
• The names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and other personal and health information of Australian applicants for flood relief have been leaked after they were uploaded to ChatGPT. Source
• The state of Victoria is considering giving residents the legal right to work from home for two days a week. Source.
• Australian Catholic University has been accused of wrongly accusing students of cheating by using generative AI. The university used an AI tool to identify the use of AI in students’ work. Source

China

• A report on global electricity generation by the clean energy thinktank Ember, found that global fossil fuel generation fell slightly in the first half of 2025, down 27 terawatt-hours (TWh) from the same period last year. That reduction was primarily driven by reductions in fossil fuel generation and corresponding increases in solar and wind generation in China and India. In both of those countries' renewables kept pace with energy demands. Solar alone met 83% of the rise in electricity demand. Source
• Ahead of trade meetings with President Trump, China has increased restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals. Source
• OpenAI has banned certain accounts linked to China after ChatGPT was to draft proposals for mass-surveillance tools and to create marketing materials for software that scans social media for political or “extremist" speech. Source
• Young people are moving away from professional online therapists in favour of AI chatbots like DeepSeek, Rest of World reports. Source
• China-linked threat actors have been spotted by cybersecurity firm Huntress using the open-source monitoring tool Nezha to deliver Gh0st RAT malware. Source
• A Chinese-speaking cybercrime group UAT-8099 has been observed performing SEO fraud and credential theft, targeting universities, tech firms and telecom providers in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Canada and Brazil. Source

India

• Filmmakers from both Hollywood and Bollywood are lobbying Indian decision makers for copyright protection from AI vendors who want to use their IP to train their AI models. Source
• US tech companies are delaying decisions to build datacentres in India because of political tensions between the two countries. Source
• E-commerce platform Flipkart, which is under pressure to become profitable prior to a planned IPO next year, has reported reduced losses for core platform Flipkart Internet and in-house logistics arm eKart for the year ended March 2025. Source
• South Korean LG Electronics India $1.3 billion IPO was oversubscribed on the first day of bidding. Source
• India’s tech sector is employing fewer graduates. Over half of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) saw graduate placement rates fall by more than 10 percentage points between 2021-22 and 2023-24, according to a report. Source
• India’s income tax filing portal exposed taxpayers’ data including names, addresses, emails, dates of birth, phone numbers, bank accounts and Aadhaar numbers. The bug has now been fixed. Source
• Anthropic plans to open an office in tech hub Bengaluru next year. Source
• National Payments Corporation of India and fintech firm Razorpay have collaborated with to launch AI-driven payments on ChatGPT. Source
• India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has posted strong quarterly revenue estimates with much of the growth coming from its banking, financial services and insurance vertical. The growth comes regardless of TCS being connected with a string of cyberattacks. Source

Japan

• SoftBank is to acquire ABB’s robotics business for $5.375 billion as it continues its push into AI and robotics. Source
• Asahi has partially restarted production at all six of its breweries in Japan after a cyberattack affected their ordering and delivery systems. Source
• The Qilin ransomware group has claimed responsibility for the attack on Asahi. Source
• Japanese poultry farms are starting to use drones to scare away wild birds to control the spread of bird flu. Source

Taiwan

• TSMC has launched a programme aimed at reducing the energy consumption of its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems. The chipmaking giant says the system will save up to 190 million kWh of electricity and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 101,000 tons by 2030. Source
• TSMC has also posted record breaking Q3 revenue of NT$330.98 billion [US$11.41 billion]. This is a 31.4 per cent year on year rise. Source
• Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker, reported a substantial rise in income in the last quarter. Revenue increased by 11% year-on-year to T$2.057 trillion ($67.71 billion), although this was lower than a LSEG estimate of T$2.134 trillion. Source

Elsewhere in Asia:

• Singapore: Singapore’s digital economy contributed to 18.6% of the country’s GDP in 2024, with finance, wholesale trade and manufacturing sectors contributing most to the growth of digital. Source
• Indonesia: Indonesia lifted its suspension of TikTok after just one day, when the social media company agreed to hand over video footage of anti-government protests that crippled the country in August. Source
• North Korea: North Korean hackers have stolen more than $2 billion in crypto so far this year, accounting for 13% of the country’s economy. Source
• South Korea: A major fire in a datacentre last month may have destroyed 858TB of government information. The system was not backed up. Source