Taiwan says thanks but no thanks to US 'offer' - Asian Tech Roundup

Plus: North Korea’s fake workers expand their horizons

Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look US attempts to strongarm Taiwan into relocating 50% of its chipmaking to America, India’s crackdown on crypto exchanges and fake North Korean tech workers looking to expand their employment opportunities.

Taiwan has rejected a US proposal that half of the islands' chipmaking capacity be relocated to America. It's easy to see why the US negotiating team, led by commerce secretary Howard Lutnick might be in favour of such a plan - decreasing its reliance on high quality silicon - the vast proportion of which is made in Taiwan - and increasing domestic capacity at one fell swoop. From Taiwan's point of view the logic looks less clear, with the proposal having something of a "nice little island you've got there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it," quality.

Critics in Taiwan immediately cried foul, and vice premier Cheng Li-chiun said the proposal, announced by the US, was never formally discussed during trade negotiations, adding that Taiwan had no intention of pursuing such measures.

Taiwan sees its dominance of the world's semiconductor industry as a "silicon shield", reasoning that any attempt by China to take back the island by force would have consequences so catastrophic for the global economy that the world would step in. Any move to relocate resources to another country would weaken this shield, even as Taiwan depends on US weaponry and presence in the region.

In related news, TSMC, Taiwan's largest chipmaker by far, was forced to deny rumours that it plans to invest in ailing US chip giant Intel. TSMC has "never entered discussions with any company on establishing a joint venture or transferring technology," a company spokesperson said.

Australia

• Telecoms firm Optus has suffered another emergency call outage affecting residents near Sydney. It’s the second such blackout after an earlier outage left four people dead. The government says it wants answers from parent Singapore Telecommunications. There have been calls for the company’s CEO Stephen Rue to resign. Source
• An Australian court been fined a man $343,500 for breaking the Online Safety Act after posting deepfake pornographic images of a prominent woman on his site MrDeepFakes.com, which has since been shut down. Source
• Australian media groups Seven West Media and Southern Cross Media have announced a A$417 million ($273.97 million) merger to create a media group fit to compete with global streaming platforms. Source

China

• A hacking group which as compromised edge devices in Asia, the US and Europe is highly likely to be a state sponsored threat activity group, according to researchers. Source
• Chinese drone maker DJI has been confirmed by the US Department of Defense to be a military company, despite its attempts at reclassification. Source
• Jensen Huang has made another attempt to get the US to lift restrictions on Nvidia chips, saying China is just “nanoseconds behind” the US. Source
• The US has “definitely shot itself in the foot on H-1Bs" and the timing is “exquisite” for China's new K visa, which aims at attracting foreign talent to China, commentators say. Source
• DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, which introduces what the AI start-up calls "DeepSeek Sparse Attention" (DSA). Sparse attention isn’t a new concept (it’s meant to speed up long conversations) but DeepSeek claims its version achieves "fine-grained sparse attention for the first time". Source
• Threat analysts at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 have dubbed a gang they have been tracking for two years ‘Phantom Taurus’ and said it is likely to be a Chinese state-backed group. Source
• Hacking group UNC5174 has been attacking a VMware security flaw since October 2024. The flaw was only recently patched. Source
• China is seeking to limit the use of European equipment, including from Ericsson and Nokia, in its telecoms infrastructure, Meanwhile the EU is probing its use of China’s Huawei and ZTE. Source
• SpaceX has received funds directly from Chinese investors, according to newly unsealed documents, as reported by ProPublica. Previously it was thought that any Chinese investment came via an indirect route. Source

India

• Security researchers found a publicly accessible Amazon-hosted storage server containing hundreds of thousands of bank transfer documents including Indian banking customers’ account numbers, transaction figures, and contact details. Source
• India’s Reserve Bank announced that all digital payments made within India must use two-factor authentication by 1^st April 2026. Source
• E-commerce giant Flipkart is relocating its headquarters from Singapore to India as it prepares for an IPO in the country next year. Source
• India’s financial regulator has moved to close 25 crypto exchanges for failing to register and comply with anti-money laundering rules. Source
• Telangana police plan to use for four cyber crime investigation tools aimed at monitoring online content and extracting data from devices, raising fears of potential overreach. Source
• Meanwhile Hyderabad police are exploring the use of AI and drones in investigations. Source

Japan

• Brewing giant Asahi Group Holdings was hit by a cyberattack that triggered a major systems failure, disrupting key business operations across Japan. Source
• Kuniyoshi Suzuki, s enior director of the cloud AI service division of SoftBank, predicts demand for AI in Japan will rise by more than 300 times by 2030. Source

Noth Korea

• A North Korean hacking gang tracking as DeceptiveDevelopment is using a remote access Trojan favoured by much more technically advanced groups, according to security researchers. Source
• Fake North Korean tech workers have expanded their job searches beyond Big Tech into companies from a much wider range of industries including healthcare, finance and professional services, according to Okta research. Source

South Korea

• A large fire at a datacentre, thought to be sparked by a battery, operated by South Korea’s National Information Resources Service has taken hundreds of government e-services offline. Source
• OpenAI has announced agreements with Samsung and SK Hynix for both to manufacture memory chips for the Stargate AI infrastructure project and build data centres in South Korea. Source

Taiwan

• Chipmaker TSMC has denied media reports that it is planning to invest in Intel, saying it had "never entered discussions with any company on establishing a joint venture or transferring technology." Source
• Taiwan publicly rejected US demands to move a proportion of its chip manufacturing to the US. The US is trying to reduce its dependence on Taiwan-manufactured chips as part of trade discussions. Source

Elsewhere in Asia:

• Indonesia: Indonesia’s antitrust watchdog has fined TikTok 15 billion rupiah ($900,000) for the late reporting of its acquisition of e-commerce platform Tokopedia. Source
• Afghanistan: The Taliban government in Afghanistan has denied reports that it is effectively severing the country from the internet. It claims the outages that the country has experienced are due to old fibre optic cables being replaced. The blackout has affected finance and aviation and cut women and girls off from the outside world. The government has not yet given a date for when it expected services to be resumed. Source
• New Zealand: New Zealand’s Institute of IT Professionals is to vote on its own closure having ramped up an unsustainable amount of debt. Source