Hello everyone, this is Cissy from Hong Kong.

Monday was a big day for BYD, as it marked the first anniversary of the Chinese EV champion’s Thailand factory. It delivered its 90,000th vehicle in Thailand, a D9 MPV from its premium sub-brand Denza, after officially entering the south-east Asian nation in 2022.

BYD is also set to begin assembling electric vehicles at its new factory in Brazil, its largest overseas market, as early as this month. The company aims to produce 50,000 vehicles there this year, a move designed to reduce reliance on imports as tariffs increase.

BYD has set a total sales target of 5.5mn vehicles for this year. In the first half of this year, the company sold approximately 2.146mn vehicles, achieving nearly 40 per cent of its annual goal. For overseas markets, BYD aims to sell more than 800,000 vehicles in 2025. The company said its overseas sales for the first six months of this year had exceeded 470,000 vehicles.

While BYD is making rapid progress in overseas markets, its Japanese counterpart Nissan has been struggling. It is attempting a comprehensive overhaul while facing persistent challenges that include mounting financial losses and falling sales, particularly in the US and China. The automaker has been cutting jobs and shutting down some factories, as well as shifting its strategy to prioritise profitability over sheer sales numbers.

Just-in-time co-operation?

Amid a sweeping global restructuring that would reduce its final assembly plants from 17 to 10, Nissan Motor appears to have found a potential saviour in Foxconn, who is in talks with Nissan to begin producing its own electric vehicles at Nissan’s Oppama plant in Yokosuka, one of the automaker’s key facilities, write Nikkei’s staff writers.

This collaboration could allow Nissan to improve utilisation rates at the Oppama site by allocating surplus production lines to Foxconn. It would also help protect jobs, as shutting down the Oppama facility would be costly for the company and its workforce.

Foxconn has been aggressively expanding into electric vehicle manufacturing through a series of joint ventures around the world. In 2024, the company acquired a 50 per cent stake in a chassis subsidiary of German auto parts giant ZF. A joint venture with Nissan is also being considered for the use of the Oppama plant.

Painful spikes

The chief executive of Hitachi Energy has warned that Big Tech’s spiking electricity use as it trains artificial intelligence must be reined in by governments in order to maintain stable supplies, writes the Financial Times’ Harry Dempsey.

Andreas Schierenbeck, who heads up the world’s largest transformer maker, said that no other industry would be allowed as volatile a use of power as the AI sector.

Huge surges in power demand at data centres training AI models, along with a bumpy renewable energy supply, meant “volatility on top of volatility” was making it challenging to keep the lights on, Schierenbeck told the FT.

“AI data centres are very, very different from these office data centres because they really spike up,” he said. “If you start your AI algorithm to learn and give them data to digest, they’re peaking in seconds and going up to 10 times what they have normally used.

“No user from an industry point of view would be allowed to have this kind of behaviour — if you want to start a smelter, you have to call the utility ahead,” Schierenbeck added, while advocating for data centres to have similar rules applied to them by governments.

AI’s next generation

The “DeepSeek moment” has revived investors’ appetite for Chinese tech stocks, which had languished since Beijing’s crackdown on the once-glittering sector. But some of the latest AI darlings, such as Manus, look to distance themselves from China in a bid to expand overseas, writes Nikkei Asia’s Cissy Zhou.

Since its sudden rise to fame, Manus has quietly moved its headquarters to Singapore and has started to aggressively recruit local talent this month, while at the same time laying off more than half of its employees in China, except some key AI engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes as the start-up seeks international investment in the face of US restrictions on funding Chinese AI companies.

More broadly, China’s appetite for AI-driven capital expenditure remains robust, despite Washington’s restrictions on shipments of Nvidia’s H20 chips, according to research by Jefferies. The investment bank said China has built up sufficient chip inventories to sustain data centre growth at least through the first half of 2026.

Supercharged ambitions

V-GREEN, the company that runs charging stations for VinFast’s electric cars and bikes, aims to expand its network in its home market of Vietnam more than sixfold to 1mn ports in three years, write Nikkei’s Yuji Nitta and Mai Nguyen.

The target highlights automaker VinFast’s ambitious targets for its home country, where government officials are slowly rolling out policies to support electric vehicle adoption. The automaker sold nearly 90,000 vehicles in Vietnam last year and aims to at least double that figure this year.

V-GREEN has also recently expanded to the Philippines and Indonesia, though the company says it is facing challenges in terms of technical standards, regulatory frameworks and legal procedures in overseas markets.

Suggested reads

1. Indonesia’s growing exodus of skilled talent worries local industries (Nikkei Asia)

2. Why carmakers need to bring back buttons (FT)

3. Samsung profits take big hit from US chip controls and AI memory shortfalls (FT)

4. Singapore’s DayOne Data Centers eyes Japan, Thailand for growth (Nikkei Asia)

5. Toray unit debuts advanced chip analysis services in US (Nikkei Asia)

6. OpenAI clamps down on security after foreign spying threats (FT)

7. Japan, UK firms seek to build ‘world’s first’ floating data centre (Nikkei Asia)

8. Shein files for Hong Kong IPO to pressure UK to save London listing (FT)

9. Apple supplier Lens Tech opens 4% up on first Hong Kong trading day (Nikkei Asia)

10. Chip software makers say US restrictions on sales to China lifted (FT)

#techAsia is co-ordinated by Nikkei Asia’s Katherine Creel in Tokyo, with assistance from the FT tech desk in London. 

Sign up here at Nikkei Asia to receive #techAsia each week. The editorial team can be reached at techasia@nex.nikkei.co.jp

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Having just passed his 45th anniversary, which is ancient in gaming years, you might expect Pac-Man to be considering retirement. Perhaps he has finally buried the hatchet with his ghost nemeses. Maybe he spends his days with his wife, trundling around a nice hedge maze in the country on a mobility scooter.

But game characters don’t get to retire. And judging by the yellow guy’s latest game, he is going in the opposite direction. The first hint that Pac-Man has gone feral is that his new adventure is rated “T for Teen”, due to an abundance of violence and blood.

The game in question is Shadow Labyrinth, a metroidvania which casts players as a hooded figure known as The Swordsman, accompanied by a familiar, sunshine-yellow sphere named Puck. This is Pac-Man transplanted into cosmic horror, traversing perilous landscapes and battling nightmarish creatures. When you defeat a boss, Puck transforms into a giant, blood-red Pac-Monster and devours the enemy’s corpse.

It’s a startling change, but Pac-Man is not the first gaming icon to undergo what we might call “mascot drift”: where a character is ripped away from the tone or genre with which they’re associated and placed in a wildly different context. In an age when familiar IP is a sure route to strong sales, game developers are scouring their back catalogues to see if they can squeeze any life from their old characters. Are the results a creative, welcome reinvention of fan favourites, or scraping the bottom of the IP barrel?

Sometimes mascot drift reeks of shameless brand synergy — hence Darth Vader and Sabrina Carpenter strolling around the colourful island of Fortnite. But in other cases it makes sense, as in fighting games such as Super Smash Bros which have large rosters of characters who can be boiled down to a few recognisable moves and poses. In the case of Pac-Man’s latest outing, it works because Shadow Labyrinth is a satisfying original game first, and a mascot vehicle second — a priority evident in the developer’s canny choice to not even put Pac-Man’s name in the title.

Mascot drift is most successful when developers take a big swing and commit to the concept. Lies of P, for instance, does the opposite of what anyone might expect from a game about Pinocchio, curdling the puppet’s morality fable into a bloody adventure through a decaying Belle Époque city. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog swaps acceleration for investigation, as you team up with Tails to investigate the apparent murder of Sonic on a train — its willingness to kill off Sega’s star, even as a gag, demonstrates the company’s subversive edge.

Nintendo is a master of mascot drift, with a cast of iconic characters who are regularly deployed in experimental new settings, from racing to tennis to brawling. Mario alone has been a plumber, footballer, doctor, referee, archaeologist, chef and painter. In last year’s Princess Peach: Showtime!, the perennial damsel in distress was reframed as an action hero who could become a ninja, detective or figure skater, while Cadence of Hyrule turned Zelda into an epic dance battle. The key to Nintendo’s experimentation is that while the genre may change, the tone stays on-brand: sweet, colourful and gloriously inoffensive. You’d never see a body horror game starring Kirby, though given the adorable pink ball’s penchant for sucking enemies into its mouth, there’s all the source material you could need for a gruesome Cronenbergian nightmare.

Placing familiar characters in a fresh context to attract new audiences is not unique to gaming. In the superhero world we’ve seen Batman evolve from 1960s camp to Christopher Nolan’s grim realism to a family-friendly Lego comedy. Recently there has been a slew of horror flicks capitalising on the IP expiry of beloved children’s characters, such as Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. This year the American IP rights to Popeye expired and there have already been three slasher movies: Popeye’s Revenge, Popeye the Slayer Man and Shiver Me Timbers. All were critically panned.

But it makes sense that mascot drift happens most energetically in gaming, a medium powered by a drive for innovation. Most games prioritise systems and mechanics over story. Their characters aren’t complex humans, they’re hollow puppets deployed in scenarios. In fact, the more specific their characterisation, the less flexible and useful they are for developers. It’s hard to imagine Ellie — the tough, traumatised survivor from zombie blockbuster The Last of Us — being placed in a zany kart-racing game.

That said, playing Shadow Labyrinth did make me reconsider the original Pac-Man, not as a cheerful arcade icon, but as the story of a ravenous yellow orb pursued by ghosts through an infinite neon labyrinth. Perhaps it’s always been a horror game in disguise. Sometimes it takes a dramatic shift to reveal what was there from the start, lurking at the heart of the maze.

‘Shadow Labyrinth’ is available from July 18 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam

Amazon is weighing another multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic to deepen a strategic alliance that the tech companies believe will provide an edge in the global competition to profit from artificial intelligence.

The Seattle-based cloud and ecommerce group has discussed plans to extend beyond the $8bn it has already ploughed into the San Francisco-based AI model builder, according to multiple people with knowledge of the talks.

A new deal would further a relationship that — according to interviews with more than a dozen Amazon and Anthropic executives, board members and investors — has become vital to both their futures.

The investment will ensure Amazon remains one of Anthropic’s largest shareholders, as it seeks to position ahead of Google which has also invested more than $3bn, while providing a bulwark against a similar multibillion dollar partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.

It would also deepen ties as the pair collaborate on one of the world’s largest data centre projects and team up on sales of Anthropic’s technology to Amazon’s cloud computing customers.

“We quickly realised that we had many shared goals that were fundamentally critical,” said Dan Grossman, vice-president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon. “The size of the [existing investment] represents our ambition.”

The strategy of close alignment comes with risks. Microsoft’s $14bn investment into OpenAI helped the duo take an early lead in the race to commercialise AI products, but that alliance is under strain because of the ChatGPT maker’s desire to move to a for-profit model.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI staff including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei who left over ethical and safety concerns. It was initially a cloud computing customer before Amazon made a $1.25bn investment in September 2023.

The Amazon deal ensured Anthropic had a “reliable source of compute and investment” at a time when Microsoft was locked into an agreement with OpenAI that would have precluded it from acting as a partner, according to one of the Seattle-based group’s executives.

In June, Amazon outlined the scale of its first site for “Project Rainier”, a large-scale data centre programme that will help meet Anthropic’s computing demands. Filled with the cloud providers’ Trainium2 chips, the facilities in New Carlisle, Indiana will draw 2.2 gigawatts in power when completed, far surpassing the scale of Oracle’s ambitious 1.2GW campus for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas.

Amazon detailed at least $11bn in investment for a cluster of 16 data centres in Indiana last year, but plans for the site have since doubled.

Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, said it had worked “really closely” with Amazon to ensure that the Big Tech group’s Trainium2 chips were suitable for its models. “The ability to have Amazon, who is developing their own chips and has the knowhow and expertise, open to our requirements, is massive,” he said.

The two companies are already discussing plans for future sites attached to Project Rainier. “The goal is to always be way ahead of what your customers are going to need,” said David Brown, vice-president of compute at Amazon Web Services. “I call it the illusion of infinite capacity.”

While Amazon is developing its own in-house foundation models, it has sought closer ties to Anthropic than Google, which is focused on building its own powerful AI models called Gemini.

The “fair value” of Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is about $13.8bn, according to regulatory filings. Its backing came in the form of convertible notes, with only a portion turned into equity so far.

Both tech giants’ stakes are capped to keep them well below owning more than a third of Anthropic. They each have no voting rights, board seats or board observer seats. Google owns roughly 14 per cent, according to legal filings.

Anthropic’s most recent equity valuation is $61.5bn, set by investors in March, according to PitchBook.

Amazon has made other investments in AI companies, including Hugging Face and Scale AI, but Anthropic is its third-largest investment to date behind MGM Studios and Whole Food Markets.

Executives at the Seattle-based group are confident that the partnership with Anthropic would be more robust than Microsoft and OpenAI, as the start-up was structured as a public benefit corporation rather than a non-profit. Investors hold equity, unlike with OpenAI where they are beholden to a complex profit share agreement.

Anthropic has previously said that it is “not owned or dominated by a single tech giant” and has chosen to remain independent.

Yet, Amazon has manoeuvred itself to be named Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner.

The model builder counts on Amazon’s data centres and its specialised Trainium semiconductor chips to develop and deploy large language models. However, Anthropic also uses Google’s custom AI accelerator chip — a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) called Trillium.

Claude, meanwhile, is embedded in Amazon products such as its improved digital voice assistant Alexa+ and streaming service Prime Video.

One Anthropic investor said Amazon’s salespeople more clearly promoted the start-up’s Claude series of models to its cloud computing customers than search giant Google.

“Google pushes Gemini in every interaction, despite backing Anthropic. They will sell Gemini at every opportunity,” added the start-up’s investor. “Amazon’s default is to sell Claude.”

Google has previously said that more than 4,000 customers used Anthropic’s models on its cloud platform. The search giant declined to comment.

Atul Deo, director of Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI app development platform, said that the company was cautious about preferring a single AI partner. “Forcing something on customers is not a good strategy,” he said, noting that an alternative provider’s models could soon be in demand.

But Kate Jensen, Anthropic’s head of revenue, said that the two companies pitched to potential customers together. “We sit down and say, you’ve already trusted Amazon with your data,” she said. “You need the world’s best model.”

Anthropic has an annual revenue run rate of more than $4bn, according to people familiar with the matter, a sliver of the $107bn AWS generated in the 2024 fiscal year.

Amazon’s decision to invest in training its own AI models, however, remains a risk for Anthropic, which relies on the tech giant to provide a robust pipeline of corporate customers which are its main revenue source.

David Luan, a former OpenAI executive, is leading the cloud provider’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence — systems that surpass human abilities — and his team has built what the company describes as “dependable AI agents” that have benchmarked better than Anthropic’s equivalent.

“There are benefits and some drawbacks to the way the relationship is structured but at the end of the day Anthropic look to us to solve a lot of their problems,” added one Amazon executive.