Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Hello, everyone! This is Cheng Ting-Fang, your #techAsia host for this week, sending greetings from Taipei as we kick off the first working week of the lunar Year of the Snake.If you live in a Mandarin-speaking place like Taiwan or China, the spring festival, which celebrates the lunar new year, is the most important holiday of the year. During this time, families traditionally gather for lavish feasts. When I was a child, our celebration would start in the late afternoon on New Year’s Eve at my grandparents’ home in the countryside. We enjoyed hot pots, marinated beef, slices of abalone, freshly steamed shrimp and fish, mullet roe and dumplings, all with endless servings of fried turnip pancakes and sweet glutinous rice cakes.Over the years, many families have gradually stopped cooking at home for the spring festival because preparing so many dishes can be overwhelming. Last year, we tried something new and took a trip overseas. However, with US President Donald Trump having just taken office and the likelihood that I would have to work over the holiday, we decided to stay in Taipei this year and dine out. Because we left the decision until just two weeks before New Year’s Eve, I ended up calling around 30 restaurants — including Indian, Japanese, Thai and Italian spots (Chinese and Taiwanese restaurants were definitely full) — until I could find a table. In the end, we settled for a hotel buffet, where we had steak and lobster, along with fries and macaroons served with English breakfast tea and coffee for our New Year’s Eve dinner. My cousins later told me that they had made their reservation at a traditional Taiwanese restaurant in another city as early as October to guarantee a table.But Trump was not the only newsmaker during the holiday season. DeepSeek was also a top topic of conversation. Even my dad and mom, who don’t work in the tech industry, have been asking what DeepSeek is all about and what it means for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Nvidia.At the beginning of the Year of the Snake, I visited a renowned temple in my hometown of Tainan in southern Taiwan. Dating back more than 460 years, this historic site is famous for hosting Taiwanese President William Lai when he was on the campaign trail and on many other occasions. The temple was packed, but I was able to take part in a special ritual where visitors crossed a “fortune and luck” bridge, and I also received a sprinkling of “lucky water”.Another highlight of the holiday was a Lunar New Year’s Day interview with Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, the top European chip equipment maker. He offered insights into AI and Japan’s efforts to rebuild its semiconductor industry. What a memorable — and busy — start to the year!Labs as a lifelineChina has many creative ways to get around US trade restrictions. One less-reported method is through “pilot production lines” at state-backed laboratories across the country, Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li of Nikkei Asia write.These labs and universities, which often have better access to foreign equipment than US-blacklisted chipmakers, are playing a key role in advancing the nation’s technology. They are rapidly setting up pilot lines and acquiring machines for small-scale production, enabling them to benchmark locally made equipment and verify designs for chipmakers and start-ups.A notable example is Hubei Yangtze Memory Labs in Wuhan, where many engineers from leading Chinese chipmaker YMTC, which was added to the US Entity List in 2022, conduct trials and test samples. Similar labs focusing on advanced chip packaging and emerging silicon photonics technologies are also sprouting up in cities like Ningbo and Wuxi.Beijing’s initiative actually goes beyond semiconductors, with state-backed labs encouraged to launch pilot production lines in areas from advanced materials and robotics to aerospace and satellites, according to a government document viewed by Nikkei.Investigations and negotiationsChina has revived antitrust investigations into technology giants Google and Nvidia and is also considering a new probe against Intel as Beijing looks for leverage in talks with Trump.China’s State Administration for Market Regulation on Tuesday announced it had opened a competition investigation into Google, write the Financial Times’ Zijing Wu, Cheng Leng and Ryan McMorrow.Two people familiar with the matter said the probe would focus on dominance of the US group’s Android operating system and any harm caused to Chinese phonemakers, such as Oppo and Xiaomi, which use the software.Chinese regulators, who announced a similar antitrust investigation into Nvidia in December, were now also looking at launching a formal probe into Intel, said two people familiar with the situation. However, the nature of the probe into the US chipmaker remained unclear, one of the people said, adding whether it was officially launched could be affected by the state of US-China relations.Beijing’s move to build cases against prominent US tech companies comes as they are increasingly caught in the crossfire of growing tensions between the two global powers.The Google probe, which regulators first began in 2019, had been shelved for years, but was reopened in December, said two people familiar with the matter. That move came just before Trump, who had campaigned on promises of imposing steep tariffs against Chinese goods, was sworn in as US president.Destination: Mars?Over the past few years, key tech suppliers to Apple, HP and Nvidia have shifted production from China to Thailand, India, Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan, in line with US pressure to diversify away from Asia’s largest economy. However, this “friend-shoring” strategy is now under threat from Trump’s unpredictable tariff policies.According to an analysis by Nikkei Asia’s Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, trade deficits with these economies have significantly widened over the past few years due to supply chain shifts, even as America’s trade imbalance with China has improved. Because Trump often criticises trade deficits and vows to correct them, investments on friendly shores may no longer be as secure as they once seemed, creating uncertainty and potentially higher costs throughout the supply chain.Chairman TH Tung of Pegatron, a key supplier to both Apple and Tesla, even joked that the only way to be truly safe from new tariffs would be to move to Mars.Crazy rich crypto investorsRich Asian investors, particularly in Singapore and elsewhere in south-east Asia, are turning their eyes to cryptocurrency investments, driven by Trump’s re-election and the rise in bitcoin’s value, Nikkei Asia’s Dylan Loh writes. According to a survey by Aspen Digital, more wealthy individuals — up to 76 per cent of respondents — had invested in digital assets in Asia for 2024 compared with a similar poll in 2022.This surge has led to growing competition among cryptocurrency platforms and traditional financial institutions vying for deep-pocketed, high-asset clients. While the potential for significant returns is attracting substantial investment, risks remain, including cryptocurrency’s high volatility, geopolitical uncertainties under Trump and a changing regulatory environment in Singapore, where mass-marketing to retail clients is strongly discouraged.Suggested readJapan’s Toto brings toilet manufacturing tech to chipmaking (Nikkei Asia)SoftBank and OpenAI to set up AI joint venture in Japan (Nikkei Asia)Samsung chair cleared of fraud and stock manipulation (FT)The global AI race: Is China catching up to the US? (FT)Panasonic ‘prepared to sell TV business,’ says president (Nikkei Asia)Taiwan’s Yageo to launch unsolicited bid for Japan peer Shibaura Electronics (Nikkei Asia)Korean women are fighting back against deepfakes (FT)LG’s artificial intelligence unit has lacklustre market debut (Nikkei Asia)India turns to private sector for rocket launches (FT)DeepSeek’s success will undermine the US-China tech war (FT)
