Asia

Summary: Japanet Holdings, the Japanese TV shopping company based in Nagasaki, has quadrupled its venture capital fund to $200 million after early investments through Pegasus Tech Ventures in Anthropic, xAI, SpaceX, and OpenAI generated extraordinary paper returns. Anthropic alone has appreciated from a $550 million valuation in 2021 to $380 billion in 2026. The expansion […]

Six weeks ago, a video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt on a rooftop went viral. It was, of course, not real. It was generated by Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s AI video model, and it set off a firestorm that drew cease-and-desist letters from six major Hollywood studios, a formal denunciation from the Motion Picture Association, […]

When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February, choking off the corridor through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows, the immediate consequences were predictable: crude prices spiked, energy markets convulsed, and geopolitical analysts reached for their most alarming adjectives. What fewer people anticipated was how quickly the crisis […]

Brad Smith met Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul in Bangkok to announce the 2026-2028 investment spanning data centre infrastructure, cybersecurity, sovereign technology, and AI skills training for millions of Thai workers. Microsoft has announced a commitment of more than $1 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure in Thailand between 2026 and 2028, the company’s largest publicly […]