Sarah Chew covers Southeast Asia’s technology, fintech, digital policy, and AI adoption landscape for RECATOOLS. Her work focuses on how regulation, platform shifts, and emerging technologies affect businesses, consumers, and digital markets across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

169
Articles
ASEAN Tech
Primary beat
May 2026
Writing since
~1124 min
Total reading
All 169 ASEAN Tech 97 Finance 65 Business 4 AI & ML 3

Articles · ASEAN Tech Showing 61–70 of 97

Printed divider tabs standing in a card index box, each labelled with a different category
ASEAN Tech

Your Database Has One Collation for Southeast Asia

MySQL 8 ships 89 collations for utf8mb4 and exactly one is for a Southeast Asian language. Five of them sorted the same six Vietnamese names into four different orders, and the default disagrees with the Vietnamese one.

23 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
A pair of small craft scissors with zigzag blades lying open on a plain white background
ASEAN Tech

What a Character Limit Does to Khmer

Truncation looks like the simplest thing a program does, until the same twenty-character limit hands an English reader nineteen characters and a Khmer reader nine. Cutting by bytes corrupted four of the six scripts we tested outright.

23 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
A street in central Hanoi seen from above, illustrating a report on Vietnam's Law on Artificial Intelligence and its 2027 compliance deadlines.
ASEAN Tech

Vietnam's AI Law Has Been In Force Since March, And The Deadlines Start Next Year

Southeast Asia's first standalone AI law took effect on 1 March, applies to foreign as well as domestic entities, and gives most existing providers until March 2027 — September 2027 in health, education and finance.

23 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
A contactless payment being made with a phone at a card terminal, illustrating a report on the Nexus project to link instant payment systems across Asia.
ASEAN Tech

The Project Linking ASEAN's Payment Systems Has A Company, A Tender And Two Go-Live Dates

Nexus would connect India's UPI, Singapore's PayNow and Thailand's PromptPay through one hub. Governance sits in a Singapore-incorporated entity, an operator tender is out, and the launch year is reported as both 2026 and 2027.

22 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
High-voltage transmission towers receding across open ground, illustrating a report on a proposed Philippine AI hub projected to need three gigawatts.
ASEAN Tech

The Philippines' AI Hub Would Need 16 Per Cent Of Luzon's Grid

Pax Silica at New Clark City is projected to require 3 gigawatts of electricity and 130 million litres of water a day. Site development on the first 500 of 1,620 hectares is expected to begin in three to five years.

22 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
The Da Nang waterfront across the Han River with a small boat in the foreground, illustrating a report on a phased Vietnamese data centre network.
ASEAN Tech

Vietnam's Sovereign AI Data Centre Plan Starts At 20 Megawatts

A joint venture has announced a US$1bn, 100 MW national network built in three phases, beginning with 10-20 MW at Da Nang. Publishing the first increment rather than the programme total makes the plan checkable within two years.

21 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Large wooden letterpress type blocks laid out face up in a tray, each letter a separate physical piece that must exist to be printed
ASEAN Tech

Why Some Languages Come Out as Empty Boxes

A page can be perfectly translated and still arrive as hollow rectangles, because rendering needs a font that contains the shapes. We opened all 30 fonts this site serves and found 30,066 characters, none of them Burmese.

21 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
Vintage postage stamps from many different countries scattered across a single white envelope on a wooden desk
ASEAN Tech

What the Same Sentence Costs in Eleven Languages

Write a prompt in Thai and it costs more than the same prompt in English — not because the model charges you differently, but because it counts your language in more pieces. We measured one document in eleven languages: 1,888 tokens in English, 19,026 in Lao.

21 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
A traditional outrigger boat on turquoise water with a small forested island behind, illustrating a report on a proposed Philippine domestic submarine cable network.
ASEAN Tech

Three Philippine Rivals Want To Build One US$500m Undersea Backbone

PLDT, Globe and Converge have proposed a national submarine cable from Batanes to Palawan with seismic sensors built in. Competitors sharing infrastructure is a judgement that inter-island backhaul has become a cost rather than a differentiator.

20 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
A helmeted delivery rider carrying parcels on a motorbike, panned against a blurred street, illustrating a report on a Southeast Asian commerce and lending group.
ASEAN Tech

Sea Grew Revenue 48 Per Cent, And The Loan Book Grew 62

Q2 revenue of US$7.8bn and Shopee GMV of US$38.3bn lead the release. The number that describes the company is Monee's US$11.1bn of loans outstanding, up 62.5 per cent with ratios called stable.

20 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
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