US says China talks yield progress on tariff carve-outs, AI dialogue

Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud business unit, is set to launch data centres in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, speeding up an overseas push as it seeks to win enterprise customers through its “full stack AI capabilities” spanning chips, cloud infrastructure and multimodal models. The first of these new data centres will open in the Netherlands in October. The cloud unit will also add to existing data centre capacity in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab...

Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for deeper integration of artificial intelligence and manufacturing during a visit to Shanghai, as Beijing seeks to expand advanced manufacturing and emerging industries amid intensifying global technology competition. “[We] should combine China’s strengths in manufacturing and digital technologies,” Li said during his visit to an AI application testing base in the city on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. He called for the creation of more manufacturing service...

Melaka on Wednesday officially called for a state election – the latest test for Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s government, which is already facing an internal feud and growing public frustration over failed reforms. The state assembly was dissolved effective from Wednesday following an official notification sent to the country’s Election Commission the previous day by Ibrahim Durum, the Melaka state assembly’s speaker. “A state election will be held within 60 days of the dissolution...

Singaporeans are among the most open to allowing an artificial intelligence agent to shop for them, but they also want the strictest guard rails, research shows. The latest agentic AI study from Global Payments released on Wednesday indicates the hoops agentic AI will need to jump through to be trusted to make purchases without human intervention. The study, which surveyed seven countries including the United States, China and the United Kingdom, found 59 per cent of Singaporeans are open to an...

A series of small earthquakes beneath Keningau, an inland district of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, is drawing attention to a part of the state where scientists say the faults are poorly understood and the consequences of a larger quake could be devastating. The latest, a magnitude-3.4 tremor on September 3, was felt in several parts of Keningau, prompting staff at the district office to suspend a meeting and move to a designated safe area. No serious damage was reported. The tremor was one of...

Paul Bratby had already drawn up plans for expanding to Hong Kong when war broke out in the Middle East earlier this year. But the founder of xBratAI, a Dubai-based AI-powered trading signals platform, soon brought that timeline forward as the Iran conflict dragged on and widened in scope. “Our Hong Kong entity had been scheduled for a few years later, but we established it in early 2026,” he said. Bratby is not alone in looking east. As missiles continue to target Gulf capitals and shipping...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Tuesday that trade negotiations with India are making “good progress” and that the two countries are aiming to conclude talks by the G20 summit in mid-December. Carney also said India had, to his understanding, confirmed that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would visit Canada around that time, though the precise date had not been finalised. “We are making good progress in our trade negotiations with India,” Carney said at a news conference on the...

A court found 15 men guilty of coordinating a series of suicide bombings in hotels and churches, which killed more than 300 people.

Japan’s prime minister met with President Trump to discuss China’s economic and security pressure while also seeking to de-escalate tensions with Beijing.