Hello from Tokyo, where the leaves are falling, as is the rain. There were 35 consecutive days of precipitation up to the end of September, the longest wet streak since records began in 1886. It has been drenching, torrential and day-long at times, with the month seeing three typhoons. More than 25 inches, or 635 millimeters, of precipitation fell on the capital, leaving it with fewer than 50 hours of sunshine. I like rain, and come from near Manchester in England, where the tired joke is that it is a gloomy city where it is always raining. Tokyo has it beat.

Flooding here and being unable to come out from under an umbrella are not the reasons for the newsletter's hiatus over the past three weeks. There has been a transition taking place, with Katey Creel departing as Tech Editor to report for Nikkei Asia from Washington D.C., while I started from Oct. 1 as her replacement at headquarters.

The brief personal background and relevant qualifications are that I moved from Hong Kong nearly a year ago to work at Nikkei Asia and was previously a tech editor for the Financial Times in London, a tech correspondent for nine years in San Francisco, and authored the #techFT newsletter.

A lot of tech news has been happening while this newsletter has been away, mainly of the AI variety. The Anthropic researcher who quit his job, saying artificial intelligence could kill us all by the end of the decade, triggered a reaction that led his boss, Dario Amodei, to pen a long essay suggesting a slowing down of frontier development, with rare support coming from SpaceX's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman. It culminated in tech chiefs attending a White House summit this week where President Donald Trump played down the dangers of "super intelligence" and agreement was reached on self-regulation, which Musk said meant AI groups would be "generally grading each other's homework."

So, model releases continued apace in September, investments in data centers and their financing were a hot topic and a groundswell of opposition to the infrastructure buildout grew.

There were worrying rogue actions by AI such as the hacking of Australia's health service and much speculation about the planned IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. I have to admit I've been slow to pick up on using OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, with both companies geofencing their products from users in Hong Kong.

Instead, like many in the enterprise, I came to appreciate Google's Gemini, accessible through the FT, and Microsoft's Copilot, provided by Nikkei. My personal Google account has become a treasure trove of personal information that is suddenly much more accessible and relevant. All the bank statements, health records, tax filings, wage slips and other documents I dutifully and nerdily downloaded or scanned over 30 years and backed up to Google Drive are now being mined by Gemini to give me a complete picture of my financial and physical health, with suggestions on what I need to do.

I think tech's OGs (original gangsters) led by Google, Microsoft and Meta have a significant advantage over OpenAI and Anthropic in this aspect. We already have years of doing business and socializing through them, so they know so much about us and are integrating AI into products we are already familiar with and use every day.

I am looking forward to trying Meta's Muse when it rolls out in Japan. The AI agent is gaining a lot of traction in the U.S., and I was intrigued by the Charm personal device Mark Zuckerberg unveiled at its developer conference last month. I think the design owes a lot to Bandai's Tamagotchi, so the keyring attachment ought to catch on here, and with the GenZers around the world eagerly embracing Japanese culture and its fashion accessories. If they're breathing, AI hires them!

The youth of Taiwan would have no problem getting a job in AI to pay for their Tamagotchi-like Charms.

Cheng Ting-Fang Lauly Li reported for Nikkei Asia on how the talent shortage is the biggest bottleneck for the industry.

"I am open to every channel, and asking my former college classmates to see if any of their younger schoolmates might be interested," employee-seeking Wayne Yang of emerging chip materials maker IV Technologies said. "But one of them told me, 'Sorry, bro! Basically, any living, breathing engineer has already been recruited by the big names.'" The problem extends across companies, subsectors and the region. Luke Lee, vice president of Texas Instruments and president of TI Japan, Taiwan, Korea and South Asia, said companies were competing over a limited talent pool in Vietnam, while the challenge was even more acute in Japan and South Korea, where the populations are declining.

"The entire industry is facing the same challenge, not only semiconductors ... it is very difficult to hire enough people now," he said.

AI should be basic infrastructure for South Korea, says deputy PM There can be few government evangelists for artificial intelligence as enthusiastic as South Korean Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon AI should be considered "basic infrastructure, like electricity" that every South Korean citizen should be able to access "without having to worry about the cost," the former LG AI researcher told the FT's Daniel Tudor in a recent interview in Seoul.

He has several trillion won (or billions of U.S. dollars) to throw at AI initiatives thanks to a tax windfall from the global semiconductor boom that AI itself is propelling.

Despite the prowess and profits of local chip champions SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, Bae fears that South Korea risks becoming dependent on other countries for the technology built on top of their products.

"Soon it will be impossible to work without AI, just as today it is impossible to work without computers," said Bae. "People have been thinking: what happens if we become dependent on American AI and then one day it is controlled or the price becomes too high?" Bae said shocks from the 1950-53 Korean War to the 1997 Asian financial crisis had reinforced a national instinct for rapid adaptation, while compressed economic development had left citizens little room to "take things slowly in life".

"There is a very strong tendency always to be an early adopter," he said.

Huge investments and full order books suggest no pause for AI Amid the debate on whether frontier development of AI should be slowed or even paused, Nikkei Asia's San Francisco correspondent Yifan Yu visited the annual AI Infra Summit in Silicon Valley, where attendance at the convention more than doubled on the previous year.

It's clear there is another gold rush of the AI kind in California and its suppliers were bullish about their prospects and dismissive that there could be any kind of pause. The huge investment in an infrastructure buildout has already been committed and order books are bulging, giving huge impetus to the advancement of AI.

Goldman Sachs Research suggests total global AI investment will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, while global investment in data center buildout alone is projected to reach $5 trillion to $6.5 trillion by 2030, according to consultancy firm Bain.

"Capital, talent and resources are all pouring into the sector," Leuh Fang, chairman of TSMC affiliate VIS, told Nikkei Asia. "A more measured, thoughtful and even slower approach to AI development would not undermine the massive demand we are seeing today.

In fact, it would benefit everyone in the long run." Singapore becoming a semiconductor AI hub Singapore is becoming a big beneficiary of the AI boom.

Nikkei Asia's flew in to attend two major plant openings on consecutive days this week. VIS inaugurated its first advanced chipmaking plant in the city-state on Monday and is already eyeing a second facility with its new capacity "sold out" due to the massive AI infrastructure boom.

Its joint venture with European chipmaker NXP, known as VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (VSMC), is opening amid soaring demand for their power management and analog chips.

On Tuesday, U.S. chipmaker Broadcom and Japan's Toppan Holdings opened Singapore's first advanced chip substrate plant months ahead of schedule, with mass production planned before the end of the year.

The partners said they aimed to "ease a persistent bottleneck" of severe substrate shortages in the tech supply chain that is constraining AI chipmaking and data center construction.

Industry executives say Singapore's political stability, predictable policies and relatively low exposure to natural disasters make it an attractive investment destination.

That's probably all you need and ever want to know about AI for now. We'll try to mix it up with other tech news in the next newsletter! Have a great week! Chris Suggested reads Sharp takes aim at Starlink dominance with universal satellite antenna (Nikkei Asia) Nvidia-backed Nscale buried ByteDance deal in push to $35bn IPO (FT) Japan Foreign Ministry to recruit overseas experts in dual-use tech (Nikkei Asia) Tencent launches payments app for 'China-maxxing' foreign tourists (FT) Foxconn leads Taiwan tech firms in plan for AI, EV hub in Poland (Nikkei Asia) SoftBank pays steep price for record bond sale to fund OpenAI bet (FT) Asia's AI adoption outpaces perception, says Google executive (Nikkei Asia) OpenAI breach of Australian government linked to wider AI hacking campaign (FT) OpenAI debuts personal AI agent Dot to rival Meta's Muse (Nikkei Asia) Shein shares sink after profits disappoint in first results since IPO (FT) Podcast: Tech Latest Asia's data centers face growing opposition Welcome to the Tech Latest podcast, where every Tuesday we deliver the hottest trends and news from the sector.

In this episode, new member of the hosting team Chris Nuttall speaks with Tokyo tech correspondent Tsubasa Suruga about the rapid expansion of AI data centers across Asia why local communities are pushing back and how governments and developers are responding to concerns over power, water and transparency.

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