AI & Models
Foundation models, enterprise AI platforms, and machine learning infrastructure
Tracking official announcements related to AI model releases, enterprise AI platforms, and machine learning infrastructure from companies with material APAC business activity.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Global Technology Leaders to Showcase Age of AI at GTC 2026
NVIDIA announced that GTC, the world's premier conference on AI and accelerated computing, will take place March 16-21, 2026 in San Jose, California. CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address alongside global technology leaders to showcase the latest advances in AI. The conference is expected to attract tens of thousands of developers, researchers, and enterprise leaders, featuring hundreds of sessions on topics ranging from generative AI and robotics to healthcare and autonomous vehicles.
Google Cloud Opens New AI Research Center in Bangalore
Google Cloud has opened its largest AI research center in the Asia-Pacific region in Bangalore, India, with a 500-person team focused on multilingual AI, emerging market applications, and responsible AI development. The center will house dedicated research teams working on large language models optimized for South and Southeast Asian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, and Vietnamese. Google Cloud also announced $1 billion in planned infrastructure investment in India over the next three years, including a new cloud region in Chennai. The Bangalore center will collaborate with IIT Bangalore and IISc on joint research programs.
SenseTime Launches SenseNova 6.0 Foundation Model with Enhanced Reasoning
SenseTime has officially launched SenseNova 6.0, its next-generation large language model, positioning it as a direct competitor to GPT-4 class models in the Chinese AI market. The model demonstrates significant improvements in multilingual reasoning, code generation, and multimodal understanding compared to its predecessor. SenseNova 6.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several Chinese-language benchmarks and competitive results on international evaluations including MMLU and HumanEval. The company is offering the model through its enterprise API platform with pricing designed to undercut both domestic and international competitors, signaling an aggressive push for enterprise adoption across APAC markets.
Rakuten Group Launches Enterprise Cloud AI Suite for Japanese Market
Rakuten Group has launched Rakuten Cloud AI Suite, a comprehensive enterprise AI platform built on its proprietary telecommunications infrastructure. The suite includes large language model hosting, AI-powered customer analytics, and automated business process tools, all running on Rakuten's own cloud infrastructure rather than third-party hyperscalers. The platform is initially available in Japan with planned expansion to India and Southeast Asia. Rakuten is positioning the suite as a cost-effective alternative for enterprises that want AI capabilities without dependency on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Enterprise software, SaaS platforms, and B2B technology solutions
Cloud computing, data centers, and digital infrastructure investments
Semiconductor manufacturing, chip design, and AI compute hardware
Digital payments, lending platforms, and financial technology infrastructure