2025 highlights: January

Tech highlights for January 2025 included:

- Alibaba Cloud unveiled an expanded suite of large language models and AI development tools, upgraded infrastructure offerings, and new support programmes for global developers. It launched its latest visual-language model, Qwen2.5-VL, shortly after news broke about DeepSeek's Janus Pro.

- Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region. AWS estimated the construction and ongoing operation of the new AWS region will add approximately US$10 B to Thailand’s gross domestic product (GDP) and support an average of more than 11,000 full-time-equivalent jobs at external businesses annually.

- In Australia, a new advisory board is formed to advise the Western Australia government on the safe application of AI in the public sector. Meanwhile, the South Australian Government is the first to create a ministry role with a focus on AI. Michael Brown, an IT expert, was named the Assistant Minister to the Premier for Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Economy.

Source: DeepSeek. Benchmarks for DeepSeek-R1 compared to OpenAI's o1.

- DeepSeek released the open source DeepSeek-R1 AI reasoning model, which it said has performance on par with the proprietary OpenAI o1. It subsequently released Janus Pro, an AI visual generator.  

NVIDIA shared that the DeepSeek-R1 model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice preview on build.nvidia.com, and said that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs can run the DeepSeek family of distilled models "faster than anything on the PC market". 

In late January, the Taiwan government banned use of the AI model in the public sector.

“DeepSeek’s breakthrough is proof that innovation will always find a way forward, regardless of economic barriers...DeepSeek’s rise is not just a milestone for China—it is a warning for the US,” said Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group.

“Tariffs may have worked in an earlier era, but in today’s world, economic power is determined by who innovates the fastest. If Washington keeps relying on restrictions instead of pushing ahead at home, it risks being left behind.”

- Google reportedly announced a US$1 B investment in AI company Anthropic.

- HP Malaysia opened a Manufacturing Transformation Center.

At CES, HP announced the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14, positioned as "the world’s most powerful 14" mobile workstation", as well as "the world's most powerful mini workstation", the HP Z2 Mini G1a.

- The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) kicked off a mission to accelerate digital transformation at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) nationwide.

- Micron Technology broke ground on a new high bandwidth memory (HBM) facility in Singapore. 

- Microsoft announced a US$3 B investment over two years in India cloud and AI infrastructure to accelerate adoption of AI, skilling and innovation.

- OCBC Bank in Singapore introduced the 2nd commercial use case using its Blockchain infrastructure, which was developed in 2022. It is the 1st bank in Singapore to sell bespoke tokenised bonds to corporate accredited investors. The bonds are structured based on the client’s desired tenor and yield. They are then minted and transferred to the client’s wallet created on OCBC’s asset tokenisation platform. 

- OpenAI and Softbank said a new company, The Stargate Project, would invest US$500 B over the next four years to build new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US. Initial equity funders in Stargate include SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. The move is expected to generate "massive economic benefit for the entire world", the two companies said. 

Green said: “AI is not a fleeting trend—it’s the foundation of the future. Investors who fail to recognise this risk missing out on one of the most transformative opportunities of our time.”

He added: “Trump’s promise to fast-track these projects using emergency declarations and executive orders further highlights the urgency and scale of this economic shift.” 

- ServiceNow launched several agentic AI solutions, including a thousand pretrained AI agents, orchestration software, and a tool to create custom agents.

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Tech highlights for 2024 can be viewed at https://www.techtradeasia.com/2025/01/the-techtrade-asia-2024-roundup-2025.html

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