Asia Pacific (APAC)

AI did not just dominate the product headlines in the first half of 2026. It became the defining force in global stock issuance, and one banker is already invoking the crashes of 2000 and 2021.

Samsung and SK Hynix will invest 800 trillion won alongside the South Korean government to build four new chip fabs, expand high-bandwidth memory production, and create a nationwide semiconductor ecosystem for the AI era.

Big AI labs get cheap compute because they have great credit. An Australian startup just signed a deal with Nvidia to hand that same edge to everyone else.

Anthropic told US senators that operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab ran 28.8 million Claude interactions through 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June 2026.

SK Hynix filed to raise approximately $29 billion through an ADR listing on the Nasdaq, as the world's dominant AI memory chipmaker seeks to bring its stock closer to US investors.

A government order took Fable 5 offline in an afternoon. Within days, a wave of downloadable coding models gave locked-out teams a second engine they cannot have recalled.

One in ten people worldwide now get news from AI chatbots, yet almost none of them click through to the source. The Reuters Institute's 2026 data shows what zero-click news looks like at scale.