India’s cloud tax holiday - Asian Tech Roundup

Plus: Chinese dev worked to death

Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at India’s latest plans to attract infrastructure investment, the sad story of a Chinese developer who died under the relentless pressure of work, and TMSC diversifying its top-end chipmaking into Japan.

India is offering a tax holiday to cloud and AI infrastructure providers aimed at attracting foreign datacentre investment. According to the government’s Union Budget 2026 proposal, any foreign company using India-based datacentres to serve overseas markets will pay no tax on that income until 2047, provided they route those services via local resellers.

The plan, designed to offer datacentre operators and hyperscalers the promise of financial stability in what is a very capital intensive industry, comes with an additional sweetener: a 15% safe harbour margin to give foreign cloud companies and their related Indian datacentre partners predictability and some protection against unexpected audits and tax demands.

India produces about 20% of the world’s data but hosts just 3% of its datacentres. The country is looking to attract more investment from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, as well as making it easier for domestic players such as Reliance and Adani to build datacentres. The government claims that with $30 billion in investment, Indian datacentres could power 8 GW of workloads by 2030, more than four times the current capacity.

However, the expansion will face serious physical and environmental challenges. The high ambient temperature across much of the country equate to massive cooling demands. Datacentres would also compete for power over India’s stretched electricity grid with other business and domestic users. Success is likely to require significant parallel investment in grid upgrades, renewable power supply and efficient cooling technology.

Australia

• Snapchat announced in a blog post that at the end of January it had disabled or locked more than 415,000 Snapchat accounts in Australia belonging to children under the age of 16, or those the company believes are under 16 based on their age detection technology. Source
• Apple released a new version of iOS for the iPhone 8, ‌iPhone‌ 8 Plus and ‌iPhone‌ X models to allow these devices to place calls to emergency services in Australia. Source

China

• A 32-year-old Chinese programmer who worked for the AI and interactive display company CTVE Group who died suddenly after working intensively for years received a new work task message eight hours after his death from heart failure. Source
• A database belonging to an unknown entity has been hacked, leaking approximately 8.7 billion records, primarily of Chinese individuals. Source
• A China-linked threat actor known as Lotus Blossom has been attributed by researchers at Rapid7 with medium confidence to the recently discovered compromise of the infrastructure hosting open-source editor Notepad++. Source
• Scientists from Fudan University in Shanghai have built a computer chip in a flexible fibre thinner than an average human hair. Use cases include VR devices and smart textiles. Source
• China’s latest tech firm to go public in Hong Kong, PCB equipment maker Han's CNC Technology, has said it aims to raise HK$4.83 billion ($618.15 million), towards the top of the range of valuations. Ten major investors are reportedly on board. Source
• Memory chipmakers CXMT and YMTC are seeking to take advantage of supply shortages to steal an advance on rivals Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Source
• AMD made in $390 million from AI chip sales to China in the last quarter, but sees uncertainty ahead due to Sino-US wrangling. It expects revenues to drop to $100 million in the current quarter. Source
• Chinese companies are applying the “EV playbook” to replicate the country’s successful strategy for vehicle innovation at scale to the field of humanoid robots, and it’s working, reports Rest of World. Source

India

• India has struck a trade deal with the US to lower American duties on Indian goods, stabilising the countries’ relationship after months of strain. Donald Trump said that India will stop buying Russian oil in exchange for the tariff reduction. India will instead buy American and Venezuelan oil. Source
• India’s finance minister has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes until 2047 on services sold outside the country if the workloads are run on Indian datacentres. Source
• In addition to the tax measure described above, India is also working on financial incentives aimed at accelerating domestic lithium and nickel processing. Both metals are critical in battery manufacturing. Source
• India’s Supreme Court has warned that it would not allow the social media giant to “play with the right to privacy” of Indian users, as judges questioned how WhatsApp monetises personal data gathered from other Meta applications. Meta was in court appealing a 2024 antitrust penalty. The Supreme Court has adjourned the matter until February 9^th. Source
• India is seeing to link its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with the Chinese-owned payments platform Alipay+. This would allow Indian users to make digital payments to overseas merchants that are part of the Alipay+ network. Source

Japan

• Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC is to start producing 3nm chips in a factory in Kumamoto, Japan, operated by Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM), which TSMC part owns. Currently, 3nm semiconductors are produced exclusively in Taiwan. Source
• Japanese NTT Data has signed an agreement with Vietnamese software development company CMC Global, “to strengthen offshore development capabilities for the Japanese market by leveraging Vietnam's IT talent.” Source
• The Japanese government has announced that a deep-sea test mission in the Pacific Ocean has discovered rare earth minerals at record sea depths - up to 6,000 metres. Japan wants to reduce its reliance on China for such minerals. Source

South Korea

• Samsung confirmed the large profit increase it predicted last month. The company more than tripled its Q4 profits ($14 billion) when compared to the same period in 2024 ($4.5 billion). Samsung said the profits boost was due to “expanded sales of HBM and other high-value-added products, as well as the overall market price surge.” Source
• Harold Rogers, interim chief executive of Coupang Korea, was held for questioning by the police for more than 12 hours over the weekend following allegations that the company destroyed evidence during an investigation into a massive personal data leak. Source
• The South Korean government, along with the South Korea stock exchange, has developed and deployed AI-powered tools to detect the marketing of ‘pump and dump’ schemes for cryptocurrencies and other non-traditional assets. Source
• The combined valuation of South Korea’s chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung by market capitalisation has reached $1.1 trillion. It's another illustration that in a reversal of previous market patterns, the AI boom is currently favouring the companies building the hardware for AI, rather than developing the AI itself. Source

Taiwan

• Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek has said it will increase prices thanks to AI driven demand and supply chain shortages. Source
• Apple is seeking new chip partners in addition to TSMC because of bottlenecks in the supply chain. Source

Elsewhere in Asia

• Indonesia: Indonesia has lifted the ban it imposed xAI’s chatbot Grok after it was used to create a torrent of nonconsensual sexual imagery. The Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs confirmed it had lifted the ban after X sent a letter “outlining concrete steps for service improvements and the prevention of misuse”. Source
• Singapore: Singapore will launch a National Space Agency as it seeks to capitalise on investment in the rapidly expanding global space economy. Source