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India's agentic AI payment plans - Asian Tech Roundup. Plus: China aims for brain-computer interface leadership. Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time Computing look at India's imminent agentic payment system, India is about to launch a framework that would allow AI agents to make small payments on behalf of users through the county's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a move that would create one of the world's first nation-scale deployments of agentic commerce. The scheme is expected to be announced next week at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai. Quoting unnamed sources, Reuters reports that the proposed system will empower AI agents to complete low-value transactions including booking services, paying subscriptions, purchasing digital goods and carrying out routine transactions automatically, without requiring human approval. India's state-run UPI is one of the world's largest real-time payment networks. First introduced a decade ago, it has transformed the way that consumers, banks and businesses exchange money. The addition of agentic payments to the system would enable autonomous financial decision-making by these actors at national scale. In the commercial sphere, nascent agentic payment systems already exist, including Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay - which recently launched authenticated agentic transactions in Singapore and Malaysia - and Agentic Commerce Protocol, a collaboration between Stripe + OpenAI + Salesforce. But, if the reports are correct, the UPI system would be one of the largest autonomous AI payments frameworks and the first by a national provider. While transactions will start small, they are expected increase in complexity and value over time. Meanwhile, there are many questions that will need answering around governance, regulation, security, accountability, transaction limits and fraud prevention. But should it prove successful at scale, agentic payment could be the basis of a whole new class of online services where AI systems not only recommend options but can also act to purchase them, with India well positioned to take a leading role in the next wave of ecommerce. China. * China-linked cyber espionage group Fire Ant compromised Cisco routers and authentication servers, deploying advanced malware to harvest credentials and suppress network logs, making forensic investigations unreliable. Source * AI startup Moonshot has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO, aiming to raise $3 billion and reportedly valued at $50 billion. Source * China has identified brain-computer interface (BCI) as one of six "industries of the future" and is subsidising domestic startups with state subsidies in a bid to compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink. Source * ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's fourth-largest DRAM maker, has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Defense to challenge its inclusion on the Pentagon's list of Chinese military-affiliated companies. Source * UBS analysts say China is unlikely to match ASML's advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines this decade, but expect the country to achieve high-volume manufacturing of immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines within two to five years. Source * Chinese tech companies are expanding their presence in Saudi Arabia, with ByteDance partnering with Mobily to build its first Middle East cloud infrastructure in Riyadh, Tencent Cloud securing a Saudi operating licence, and Lenovo preparing to start mass laptop production in Riyadh. Source India. * India is preparing to launch a framework for agentic payments on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), allowing AI agents to make small digital payments on behalf of users without requiring approval for each transaction. Source * X must "follow the law of the land" on the social media platform's new rule to make content takedown requests by any government public, an Indian government official has said. Source * Yotta Data Services, backed by the Hiranandani Group, is planning an IPO for early 2027 to raise up to $1.5 billion to repay debt, purchase GPUs, and expand sovereign cloud infrastructure, tapping into surging demand for AI compute capacity in India. Source * Meta removed dozens of fraudulent app advertisements in India after government advisories and media inquiries revealed the ads were actually banking malware disguised as pornography, capable of stealing one-time passwords and banking PINs. Source * India's Election Commission has deleted over 130 million voters from electoral rolls using an AI-driven process, sparking protests and legal challenges amid allegations of bias against marginalised groups and concerns about disenfranchisement ahead of key state elections. Source * Unacademy, once valued at $3.4 billion, has been acquired by rival upGrad for $206 million in an all-stock deal, marking a 94% drop from its peak valuation and highlighting the ongoing consolidation in India's edtech sector. Source * Indian media platform JioHotstar has launched in Singapore, UK and Canada offering over 160,000 hours of entertainment content in more than 12 languages, but with no live sports at launch. Source Japan. * Toyohiro Akiyama, the first Japanese citizen and journalist to travel to space, has died at 84. Akiyama flew to the Mir space station in 1990, filing daily reports for Tokyo Broadcasting System, and later became a professor and author after leaving journalism. Source * Japan's Ministry of Defence has requested a record $55.5 billion budget for fiscal 2027, prioritising AI, unmanned drones and stand-off weapons in response to rising security concerns from China, North Korea and Russia. Source Singapore. * Singapore is Southeast Asia's Tier 1 data centre hub, with 1GW of operational capacity and a vacancy rate of just 1.4%. Source * The Monetary Authority of Singapore will invest $220 million over three years through the FSTI 4.0 scheme to boost fintech innovation, support AI adoption, and develop talent, aiming to fund at least 1,000 internships and anchor global research functions in Singapore. Source * 79% of Singapore organisations experienced at least one AI-related cyber threat in the past year, with phishing, impersonation, and deepfake attacks among the most common. Source South Korea. * Broadcom's latest AI chip guidance triggered a selloff in South Korean memory giants Samsung and SK Hynix, as investors questioned the outlook for high-bandwidth memory supply and margins. Source * South Korea's Foreign Exchange Stabilisation Fund purchased about $20 billion in US dollars repatriated by SK Hynix after its $26.5 billion ADR listing, a move intended to stabilise FX market volatility and replenish depleted forex reserves. Source Taiwan. * Taiwanese companies are planning an additional $20 billion investment in the US, driven by demand for AI applications and semiconductor manufacturing, according to Taiwan's economy minister. Source * Taiwanese prosecutors are investigating Unimicron, a major supplier to Nvidia and Intel, over allegations of relabelling China-made circuit boards as Taiwanese products. Source * Micron's Taiwanese unions are threatening to strike over a bonus dispute, raising concerns about potential disruption in the semiconductor sector. Source * Taiwan's government reports that China is intensifying efforts to obtain advanced chip technology and talent through indirect channels, including poaching and data theft, as part of a broader strategy to break through international containment. Source Elsewhere in Asia. * Asia: Public opposition to datacentres is growing in many Asian countries. Source * Australia: Thousands of staff at the University of Sydney staged a 24-hour walkout, protesting over job security and protections against AI-driven changes that threaten academic and professional roles. Source * Indonesia: Indonesia's financial institutions are moving from AI experimentation to data modernisation, focusing on building unified and secure data environments to support operational AI and fraud prevention. Source * North Korea: North Korean job fraud schemes have expanded beyond IT, with operatives now targeting roles in healthcare, sales, marketing, and financial services, using forged identities and remote access tools to infiltrate global companies and funnel earnings to the regime. Source

ByteDance is planning to build a 5–6GW data centre cluster in Jining district, Inner Mongolia, according to sources. The area already hosts projects from Huawei Technologies, Kuaishou, Alibaba Group Holding, and Apple. Ulanqab attracts large-scale data centre construction due to low-cost power, available land, and national policy encouraging computing workloads to shift from eastern cities to energy-rich northern and western regions. Inner Mongolia's wind and solar capacity creates periods of excess renewable power supply, which officials hope data centres will absorb. ByteDance recently secured a reported $29.6 billion bank loan. The development aligns with China's broader AI infrastructure expansion, with Alibaba reportedly considering up to $69 billion in AI data centre spending over three years.

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, has secured a $29.6bn loan, making it Asia's second-largest dollar-denominated borrowing this year, according to sources familiar with the matter. The substantial financing marks a significant capital raise for the social media giant amid ongoing global scrutiny of its operations. However, the sources did not disclose details about the loan's terms, intended use, or the financial institutions involved in the deal. The loan's size positions it as one of the year's most notable corporate financing transactions in the region, reflecting ByteDance's continued access to substantial capital despite regulatory challenges in various markets.