AI Weekly Malaysia

Malaysia's NanoMalaysia Bhd (via Gigafactory Malaysia) and Indonesia's National Battery Research Institute jointly unveiled prototype graphene-infused NMC lithium-ion pouch cells called the Nusantara Battery at the 4th ASEAN Battery Technology Conference in Sepang. No energy density, capacity, or charging specs were disclosed as prototypes have not completed full testing. The project stems from an MoU signed at ABTC 2025 covering technology transfer, joint research, testing, and training.

A first-person account of how sondehub.org started as a joke URL redirect to Habhub in 2018, then evolved into a full radiosonde tracking service as Habhub's infrastructure struggled under volume. The project moved from proxying data through AWS to building backwards-compatible APIs, running its own predictor, and exposing open data via S3 — attracting government information requests along the way.

A three-year microSD card torture test wrote 133 petabytes across 351 cards, running them to failure. SanDisk stood out negatively, with 6 of the 7 SanDisk cards tested failing before the end of the study.

ASRock's X870E Taichi White motherboard is a white-colored refresh of the original Taichi, now adding 10 GbE networking and retaining active VRM cooling. Tom's Hardware notes it looks good but is priced high enough to put off some buyers.

Datacenter operator DataVita secured a £300M debt facility to expand its DV1 facility (to 40 MW) and build DV3 (another 40 MW) in Scotland's Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone, with completion expected by end of 2026 and summer 2027 respectively. CoreWeave has already leased the full capacity of both facilities for 15 years, while Dell is opening a small administrative office in the area.

CISA added four critical vulnerabilities (macOS, SharePoint, vCenter, Microsoft IKE) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog due to active exploitation. The VMware vCenter flaw (CVE-2026-59310) has been used by a suspected China-nexus APT to deploy Babuk-derived ransomware across 361 IPs, while the Microsoft IKE flaw (CVE-2026-33824) was exploited alongside an AI-enabled autonomous hacking campaign using DeepSeek.

Acer Malaysia launched its CA1 series smart monitors on wheels: the 27-inch CA271 at RM2,699 (pre-order through 30 Sept 2026) and the 31.5-inch 4K CA321QK at RM3,499, both with built-in batteries for up to 3 hours of cordless use and Android 14 with Google Play Store access. Early buyers get a complimentary portable display (PM191QE worth RM469 for the 4K model, PM161QJ2 worth RM299 for the 27-inch).

Taiwan's AI server export boom drove 11% GDP growth and a $903B export surge, financing a $7.4B universal dividend that pays every resident $314. President Lai Ching-te framed the payout as ensuring the AI windfall 'can be shared by all.'

Nvidia H200 GPUs are reaching ByteDance and Tencent as Beijing eases its import restrictions, but most licensed chips must remain in Hong Kong, which reportedly lacks the power infrastructure to run them at scale. This creates a bottleneck where chips are physically present but operationally constrained.

Chinese AI firms are accessing advanced Nvidia compute (including GB300 chips) through data centers in Southeast Asia, exploiting a loophole in U.S. export controls that focus on physical chip ownership rather than remote access. The White House has already accused Moonshot AI of using Nvidia GB300s via a Thailand facility for its Kimi K3 model, and lawmakers are considering granting authority to regulate remote cloud access to controlled technology.

In 1996, id Software released a $10 Quake shareware CD that locked full versions of all their games behind an encryption scheme unlocked via phone payment. The encryption was cracked within 39 days, leaving the developer with 150,000 unsellable discs.

Tom's Hardware highlights a $500 discount on a prebuilt desktop featuring an RX 9060 XT 16GB GPU, Intel Core Ultra 9 285 CPU, 32GB DDR5 RAM, and 2TB SSD. The article text itself is mostly site navigation and membership boilerplate, with no substantive review or benchmark data included.

Air Theremin is a browser-based instrument you play by waving both hands at a webcam or tilting a phone's gyroscope, with hand spread controlling volume, hand height controlling pitch, and gestures for vibrato and tone. It also falls back to mouse input and runs on a plain laptop webcam. It was created by Pavel Gurov and is based on theremin.site.

Recruitment firm Core Tech Recruitment reports that SAP consultant job ads across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland typically quote salaries 10-12% above the eventual offer, citing examples like a senior consultant ad at €87,000-€115,000 resulting in offers of €79,000-€104,000. Owner Carl Weaver attributes the gap to both sides pricing in expected haggling, ads quoting total package vs. offer quoting base, and candidates lacking competing offers by the final stage.

Amazon plans to expand Prime Air drone deliveries to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by end of 2026, a sixfold increase from its current footprint, following a regulatory greenlight for longer-range flights. VP David Carbon told staff in March the service would hit 1 million deliveries this year; Amazon says it currently makes thousands daily.

A developer used Claude AI to build a native macOS driver for an obscure Windows-only printer, using a Linux container approach to enable system-wide Cmd-P printing. The resulting driver is published on GitHub.

Relativity Networks raised $22M in SAFE note funding plus a $40M follow-on order from an unnamed hyperscaler to deploy hollow-core fiber in data centers. Hollow-core fiber transmits light through a vacuum chamber instead of glass, cutting per-kilometer latency from ~5 microseconds to ~3.5 microseconds—a 30% speedup that matters as AI compute spreads across multi-campus deployments spanning hundreds of acres.

Raspberry Pi released a $600 Programming Jig that combines the provisioning host and pogo-pin interface into a single 1.8 kg unit for flashing Compute Module 5 (CM5) boards. Each module takes about 90 seconds to provision — clamp it, close the lid, wait for the green LED, then swap the next one — eliminating the need for a separate IO board and host computer. The jig runs its own OS (written via Raspberry Pi Imager) and is accessed remotely through Raspberry Pi Connect.

A Minecraft player built a working AI chatbot inside vanilla Minecraft using 445,000 command blocks, down from an initial estimate of over 1 million, with no mods, plugins, or datapacks required. The project worked around in-game math limitations to implement an LLM-like system purely through command-block logic.

The White House has removed data centers, batteries, and augmented reality from its list of critical and emerging technologies, while adding post-quantum cryptography, integrated photonics, and high entropy alloys. The article text itself is mostly site navigation and membership boilerplate, so detailed policy rationale is not available from this source.

A Kearney survey of over 1,000 Malaysians found TikTok contributed RM20 billion in GVA to Malaysia's economy in 2025 (~1% of GDP), supporting 147,000 jobs. 1.8 million local businesses operate on TikTok Shop, with 50% of surveyed businesses reporting it drives over 40% of their total sales. TikTok Shop has trained over 100,000 MSMEs in live selling and digital marketing via partnerships with MATRADE, MDEC, and FAMA.

Korea Artiz Studio, a bridal photography chain, abruptly ceased operations in Singapore, with 66 complaints and over S$271,000 in prepayment losses filed with CASE between Aug 14-18. The studio also reportedly closed outlets in Taiwan and Indonesia, leaving customers who paid upfront scrambling for refunds or completed photo sets.

A GitHub programmer ported playable Doom to a Canon EOS 550D DSLR camera using the open-source Magic Lantern firmware, running it on the camera's 3-inch TFT LCD with the camera's physical buttons as controls and sound output.

DRAM prices have risen ~500% in 12 months, with 128GB DDR5 kits now 10x their lowest historical price—undoing roughly 20 years of Moore's Law progress and pushing per-unit memory costs back to 2007 levels. Hyperscale buyers have reportedly locked in nearly all global DRAM production capacity for 2027 with advance deposits, making mainstream DRAM chips worth over half as much per kilogram as solid gold. Separately, OpenAI paused some frontier RL training for two weeks and is holding its largest planned frontier RL run while strengthening monitoring, isolation, and red-teaming.

UK tax authority HMRC has awarded three low-code contracts worth up to £657 million to Atos (£78.2M), Cognizant (£360M), and Coforge (£219M) for build, configuration, DevOps, and support across Pega, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, and Power Platform. The awards come under the DALAS framework, whose Lot 4a was originally estimated at £700M and whose broader second phase was valued at £2.8 billion, as HMRC struggles with one of the UK's largest and most complex legacy IT estates.