Alibaba Cloud is ramping up its global strategy, pushing aggressively into the Middle East and Southeast Asia to expand its presence in fast-growing emerging markets.

Apple announced that John Giannandrea, its senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, will officially retire in spring 2026. He will serve as an advisor during the transition period.

Japanese industrial robot manufacturer Fanuc announced on December 1, 2025, that it will partner with Nvidia to develop AI-driven robots capable of performing tasks based on verbal commands. The collaboration aims to integrate Nvidia's AI technology and embedded computers into Fanuc's robots, enabling autonomous operation and advanced simulation in virtual factory environments.

The US government has reduced the tariff rate on imports from South Korea to 15%, retroactive to November 1, 2025, following South Korea's approval of major investment commitments in the US, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The adjustment applies to multiple products, including automobiles.

Merck Group's Kaohsiung semiconductor technology flagship campus officially completed phase one on December 1, marking Merck's first large-scale semiconductor materials technology campus worldwide. It has invested a total of EUR500 million (approx. US$580.5 million) over the past five years to build the campus, which covers key materials technologies required for AI applications, including thin-film technology, specialty gases, and formulated materials.

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of Gigabyte Technology, has entered a strategic partnership with India-based electronics manufacturing services provider Syrma SGS Technology to begin local production of Gigabyte server products in Tamil Nadu, the companies announced on Thursday. The move aligns with India's "Make in India" policy and is intended to expand Giga Computing's supply chain footprint in South Asia.

Alibaba Group's open-source Qwen model, recognized as a key player in the AI market, now forms the foundation of Singapore's large language model (LLM) SEA-LION. The latest version, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, is based on Qwen3-32B.

India has ordered smartphone makers to pre-install a state-owned cybersecurity app on all new devices and push it to existing phones via software updates. The move is already drawing industry pushback over privacy implications.

When Google DeepMind launched the Gemini project two and a half years ago, CTO and Chief AI Architect Koray Kavukcuoglu acknowledged that Google was "still far from the top level"—a frank admission that the company was playing catch-up in the generative AI race. Yet Google possessed formidable advantages: an AI infrastructure spanning TPUs, global data centers, product distribution capabilities, a mature safety system, and massive invocation gateways built on Search and Android. Once combined with a unified model, these capabilities would form a network effect difficult to replicate.

Amid rising demand for Google's TPU chips, MediaTek has emerged as a key ASIC supplier with confirmed orders for its V7e product line set to begin shipping in the second half of 2026. Market sources indicate that MediaTek expects shipments of 300,000 to 400,000 units next year, surpassing earlier conservative estimates and positioning the company to reach its US$1 billion revenue target from this segment. Looking at the full V7e product cycle, total shipments could reach at least 2 million units, with peak volume anticipated in 2027.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has remained one of the few sectors with sustained global momentum over the past two years, but the underlying architecture of AI computing is shifting. ChatGPT sparked a GPU-led surge driven by Nvidia, while Google's Gemini 3 has redirected attention to AI servers built on its proprietary TPU accelerators.