Chip chemicals and crackdown on cybercrime

Hello everybody!

Hope you're having an ideal summer. This is Cheng Ting-Fang, your #techAsia host for this week. I'm writing from my home office as the primary typhoon of the 12 months rips through Taiwan with strong winds and heavy rain.

A number of days ago, I visited the newly expanded workspaces of Advantest, the world's largest chip testing equipment manufacturer, in northern Hsinchu. Wu Wan-Kun, President and CEO of Advantest Taiwan, gave us a tour of the premises. I used to be surprised to seek out that the office was a marked departure from the everyday, boring workspaces seen across much of Asia. Instead, it resembled the fashionable coworking spaces of U.S. tech giants like Google. With various open areas, ample natural light, and versatile seating, employees are free to decide on where to take a seat once they are available. The office also includes a dedicated rest zone equipped with large monitors and ergonomic chairs. There's even a small indoor putting green for golf. This modern and comfortable office design suggests a post-pandemic chip industry move away from the traditionally rigid work culture, aimed toward attracting top young talent.

“Many of the young employees like working within the cafeteria. It's flexible,” Wu said. Advantest is considering establishing offices and extra development and sales team members in other Taiwanese cities, including Chiayi, a historically agricultural city where TSMC is currently constructing its first plant, a complicated chip packaging factory for AI computer chips.

“Our business in Taiwan is growing in a short time because of the boom in AI and high-performance computing,” he said, adding that demand is “much, much higher than expected” because recent AI chips require more complicated testing procedures. This has created a fortunate problem for Advantest. Demand for its machines is so high that delivery times are getting longer and longer, in keeping with Wu. “It's greater than six to eight months.”

However, not everyone seems to be so optimistic. US stocks had their worst day since 2022 on Wednesday as investors sold technology stocks. The sentiment continued in Asian trading, with SK Hynix shares falling sharply on Thursday morning despite robust numbers. AI-powered revenue.

Chemical response

The increase in demand for AI chips is driving growth at the opposite end of the availability chain: the chemicals sector.

Nikkei Asia Cheng Ting Fang spoke to Philippe Kehren, CEO of Belgian chemical giant Solvay, concerning the latest trends and his optimistic outlook for the sector. For example, the corporate is targeting annual growth of as much as 25 percent over the subsequent five years for electronic-grade hydrogen peroxide, a key chemical within the manufacture of microchips.

Solvay also supports Europe in its goal of reducing a minimum of 30 percent of its Supply of rare earthscurrently controlled by China. Kehren says the corporate is expanding a plant in France to support the bloc's localization efforts, adding that Solvay ultimately wants to produce countries like Japan, which also wants to scale back its dependence on China for critical metals.

But the CEO also gave a frank assessment of the challenges related to changing supply chains. “We need the support of your entire value chain,” he said. “If customers need to proceed to purchase 100% in China, it won't work.”

Open to AI

Japan has attracted a few of the world’s largest technology corporations, Spark alarm from the creative industry that the country’s copyright rules allow widespread use of copyrighted material to coach artificial intelligence models, write Kana Inagaki And David Keohane for the Financial Times.

Over the past two years, global technology leaders, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI's Sam Altman, flocked to Tokyo to satisfy Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, drawn by the big potential of AI in an economy facing an ageing population and chronic labor shortages. OpenAI later selected Tokyo as the situation for its first office in Asia.

However, critics say some AI corporations are interested in this market because they will widely use copyrighted images and other material for industrial purposes without searching for permission or paying fees.

Japan's open approach to AI comes at a time when other countries corresponding to the US, EU and China are developing stricter rules for training technology corporations to develop their AI models.

Little Red Manual

Social platform Xiaohongshu – whose name literally means “little red book” – has been described by some outside observers as China’s version of Instagram, but users say the service is more like a mix of X, Google, Yelp and Tripadvisor. rolled up into oneThe user base is young and predominantly female, with half of the users born after 1995.

The privately held company continues to be relatively unknown outside China, where 90 percent of its 300 million monthly energetic users are based. However, it’s gaining momentum in Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the USA, writes Cissy Zhou from Nikkei Asia.

But despite its popularity and status as a “lifestyle encyclopedia,” the platform’s biggest challenge is finding ways to raised monetize its influential user base.

More control for web sites

Malaysia and Singapore are Expanding your area of ​​control of social media platforms and messaging apps, including Facebook, TikTok and WhatsApp, as a part of accelerated efforts to crack down on online fraud and other cybercrimes, writes Nikkei Asia's Norman Goh And Tsubasa-Suruga. Malaysia has required online platforms to register for an annual license, otherwise the web site can be illegal. The regulation is about to return into force at the top of the 12 months. Singapore has required operators to proactively discover and combat fraud and malicious activities.

However, there are also concerns that the stricter social media regulations could possibly be abused to suppress criticism of the federal government, potentially undermining freedom of expression in Southeast Asian countries.

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