Three weeks after a stock market debut that ended flat, Mynt has handed investors the number they were told to wait for. The parent of GCash, the Philippines’s dominant e-wallet, said its third-quarter revenue hit ₱24.0 billion (about US$400 million), up 16.6 per cent year-on-year and the highest in its history.

The timing matters. When Mynt listed on 20 October after raising ₱60.9 billion (roughly US$1 billion) in the largest IPO in Philippine history, local brokers advised would-be buyers to hold off until the Q3 numbers landed. Their worry was simple: the hype was loud, and Mynt’s second quarter had slipped from the first. The stock, priced at ₱6.60, a hefty 34 per cent below its ₱10 ceiling, closed its first trading week at ₱6.27.

Also Read: The Philippines doesn’t need more fintech apps; needs rails

On paper, the quarter answers that worry. Nine-month revenue rose 12.2 per cent to ₱67.1 billion (about US$1.1 billion), quicker than the 9.8 per cent growth posted at the half-year mark. Net income for the period climbed 17.4 per cent to ₱16.5 billion (about US$275 million), up from 7.3 per cent growth in the first half. Net margin stood at a healthy 24.5 per cent.

The loan book is outrunning the user base

The more revealing numbers sit further down the release. Monthly active users rose 9.7 per cent to 42.1 million, which is respectable but hardly explosive for an app that is already the country’s default wallet. Daily transactions averaged 64.4 million over nine months, up 16 per cent, so existing users are doing more rather than new ones flooding in.

Payments gross transaction value, the total money flowing through the app, grew 23.1 per cent to ₱15.1 trillion (about US$252 billion). The standout, though, is credit. GCash’s loan portfolio swelled 43.3 per cent to ₱79.3 billion (about US$1.3 billion), growing more than four times faster than its user base. Active borrowers reached 7.8 million, roughly one in every five monthly users.

That arithmetic tells you what Mynt is turning into. Payments win the users; lending makes the money. It is the same quiet pivot Grab’s own third-quarter numbers laid bare last week, and part of a wider regional shift in which fintech, having solved distribution, now has to scale on the balance sheet.

The non-performing loan (NPL) ratio, the share of loans where borrowers have stopped paying, held at 4.8 per cent, flat on the previous quarter. Mynt calls that sustained asset quality. A more cautious reading is that it is stable, not low. Nearly one in every 20 pesos lent has gone bad, a sign that GCash is lending to customers traditional banks often skip. That is both the social mission and the risk. The average loan works out to roughly ₱10,200 (about US$170): small-ticket, high-frequency credit that can sour quickly when household budgets tighten.

What the press release does not say

Two caveats deserve attention. First, the release claims record quarterly net income but discloses profit only on a nine-month basis. Investors therefore cannot cleanly set Q3 profit against Q2, the very comparison analysts flagged before listing.

Second, the cost line is flattered. Mynt says operating expenses grew in line with revenue, but most one-off IPO costs will be booked in the fourth quarter, alongside what it calls seasonally higher costs. Q4, in other words, is where the margin story gets its real test.

Also Read: MoneyHero’s Q2 exposes the rising cost of fintech growth in Southeast Asia

The macro backdrop is not friendly either. The peso hit a record low in October and the Philippine Stock Exchange index sank to an 11-month low, with foreign investors pulling about US$623 million out of local shares this year.

Chief Financial Officer Evelyn Ng nonetheless struck a confident note, arguing that GCash has shown “there is good business in doing good” and that sizeable room remains to grow in both payments and lending.

A crowded fight for Filipino borrowers

GCash is not lending into an empty field. Maya, the PLDT-backed fintech under Voyager Innovations, runs its own wallet and digital bank. Specialist lenders are pushing in too: Salmon is betting US$140 million on secured lending, while Grab’s US$1.49 billion Atome deal brings a regional buy-now-pay-later player with Philippine ambitions under a superapp roof.

GCash’s edge is distribution: 42 million monthly users and a stream of transaction data no bank can match, built on regulatory foundations that, as one e27 contributor argued, are what let Philippine fintech scale this fast. Its weakness is concentration. Unlike Grab or Sea, every one of Mynt’s pesos is earned in a single market, exposed to a single currency and a single central bank.

April’s lock-up is the next exam

For the Philippine Stock Exchange, which has struggled to win tech listings in a year when Malaysia carried Southeast Asia’s IPO market, these numbers are welcome relief. More than 140,000 GCash users, many of them first-time investors, bought into the IPO through the app’s own trading platform. Their money now rides on the same loan book the company is racing to grow.

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s fintech apps don’t have a literacy problem, they have a fear problem

The quarter proves Mynt can grow profit faster than revenue even as user growth cools. It does not yet prove the bad-loan line can stay flat while the loan book expands by more than 40 per cent a year. The fourth-quarter results, and the expiry of the 180-day lock-up on pre-IPO shareholders in April, will show whether the market believes it can.

The post GCash’s record quarter shows Mynt is now a lender that happens to run a wallet appeared first on e27.

Nvidia’s board has opened an independent investigation into Jensen Huang after the CEO admitted in a staff memo to an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed. A memo circulated among US policymakers earlier this year claimed China’s Ministry of State Security had recruited her to spy on him. Beijing’s embassy in Washington has dismissed the allegations, and no one has been charged.

The board said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and that it retains confidence in Huang. Independent directors will run the probe with outside legal counsel.

The Singapore angle is what the region should watch. Megaspeed, a cloud company that grew out of a Chinese gaming business, became Nvidia’s largest buyer in Southeast Asia, purchasing roughly US$2 billion worth of chips, according to The New York Times. That reporting raised questions over whether the chips reached Chinese users in breach of US export rules, claims Nvidia says it investigated and debunked.

The timing could hardly be worse. Nvidia reports earnings on 17 November, and three House committee chairs want Huang at a closed-door briefing a day later. For Southeast Asia’s data centre and AI infrastructure players, who rely on steady access to Nvidia hardware, any tightening of export scrutiny would land close to home.

Read the full article here.

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REGIONAL

Thailand files criminal complaint against Bitget, moves to block it: The SEC alleges operator BG Limited served Thai users without a licence from 2022 to 2025, and wants access cut from December 5. The case clouds Bitget’s bid to buy licensed exchange GMO-Z.com.

A quarter of Filipino workers use AI agents, but only 15% of firms do: Gobi Partners puts worker adoption above the 16% global average, yet AI startups took under 1% of 2026 deal value. IBPAP has cut its 2028 headcount target from 2.5M to a best-case 2.14M.

Equinix opens US$290M SG6 data centre in Singapore for AI workloads: The first phase adds about 1,550 cabinets and scales to 20MW of IT load. SG6 is Equinix’s first site approved under Singapore’s Data Centre Call for Applicationframework, which rations new capacity by efficiency and economic value.

Chocolate Finance takes its cash management app to Hong Kong: The Singapore fintech, which manages over US$1.25 billion for more than 130,000 users, offers a 3.8% annual return on the first US$12,800 deposited and will cover any shortfall until June 2027.

U Mobile opens 5G-A sandbox to Cradle startups, minus the cheques: Malaysia’s second 5G operator brings test kit, engineers and enterprise introductions, but no guaranteed funding or contracts. The real test is whether pilots turn into paid deals as Singtel writes bigger cheques.

Shopee says Singapore affiliate sales grew nearly 50% in a year: Its local affiliate network now exceeds 300,000, and creator content drives one in 10 platform visits. The figures are unaudited, and Shopee disclosed no merchandise value ahead of its 11.11 campaign.

INTERVIEWS & FEATURES

Gobi pitches one-person AI firms to fill Philippines’ Series A gap: Philippine Series A value has fallen 98% this year. Gobi argues AI-native solo founders can validate ideas on US$5,000 to US$20,000, though 86% of the country’s 8,640 one-person corporations remain traditional service businesses.

Yale’s Sonnenfeld puts Jensen Huang’s survival odds at 50-50: Nvidia has no obvious successor and no dual-class shares shielding its founder. Its role as AI’s chief financier, with stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, means a leadership crisis could ripple across the industry.

Data centre backlash and Musk’s losses top tech’s midterm hangover: TechCrunch’s Equity team notes voters approved most data centre restrictionson local ballots, while Musk’s half-billion-dollar Republican spend bought little. OpenAI has already dropped NDA demands and rebranded sites as compute campuses.

INTERNATIONAL

South Korea fines Coupang US$220M over food delivery dominance: The Korea Fair Trade Commission says Coupang required merchants to match termsoffered on rival platforms and penalised those who refused, curbing their pricing freedom and hampering rivals such as leader Baedal Minjok.

India’s NPCI launches AI and blockchain technology subsidiary: NPCI Tech Solutions, led by former CTO Vishal Kanvaty, is the UPI operator’s fourth wholly owned unit. It will build digital public infrastructure services such as eKYC Setu; budget and revenue targets remain undisclosed.

Tesla to end Cybertruck production in 2027 to build more Cybercabs: Musk once forecast 250,000 annual sales; Tesla has sold only tens of thousands in three years. It is the third model Tesla has axed, after the Model S and X, as it pivots to robotaxis and robots.

SNL’s new Elon Musk impression lands after a rough week for Musk: Jeremy Culhane plays Musk as desperate to be liked after his half-billion-dollar midterm bet flopped and the Cybertruck’s demise. SNL has also skewered Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and data centre backer Kevin O’Leary this season.

CYBERSECURITY

Fake Wi-Fi and a bogus security workshop drained traders at TOKEN2049: ‘Evil Twin’ hotspots and a side event that pushed remote-control malware let attackers empty hot wallets in Singapore, including over US$4M from trader Frogman. The writer urges eSIMs, VPNs and cold storage.

Intrusion at SoftBank’s IDC Frontier hit 495 cloud customers: SoftBank Corp. says attackers took no data from customers’ virtual servers in the October 7 incident, which hit corporate and local government users. It still lifted its FY2026 revenue forecast to US$49.9B.

Binance CFO Kaiser Ng exits a week after US$6.3B North Korean hack: The FBI blamed North Korea’s TraderTraitor group for the breach. Once accounts unfroze, users pulled a net US$3.6 billion within hours. Justin Yek takes over, and Binance says it will absorb all losses.

SEMICONDUCTOR

Nvidia, SK Telecom bring Korean startup Rebellions into sovereign AI: Rebellions’ R200 chips will plug into Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion and MGX racks, handling decode while Nvidia GPUs run prefill. Seoul backs the project, but the systems will only be ready for deployment in 2028.

Analog Devices closes US$1.35B buy of edge-AI chipmaker Alif: The deal brings Alif’s low-power AI microcontrollers and its Singapore and Bengaluru engineering teams into ADI. ADI has not said how those teams will be integrated or whether US$200 million in contingent payments were triggered.

US memo claims Megaspeed exec was recruited to spy on Nvidia’s CEO: Separately, The New York Times found New Matrix, a Chinese firm cleared to buy Nvidia chips, listed an office that was an empty shell, raising fears it fronts a blacklisted private equity firm.

AI

OpenAI reportedly raises US$11B at a US$1.25 trillion valuation: The round could reach about US$20 billion, far below September’s US$30B goal. Potential buyers of Anthropic’s IPO shares are also eyeing a lower valuation as midterm results rattle AI stocks.

Ramp data shows enterprise AI spending stalling as token use climbs: Token spend grew just 1.5% across August and September, against 42% in July, as price cuts and tighter budgets bite. Ramp’s economist says the hypergrowth era may be over just as Anthropic prepares to list.

UBTech, Tianyi Telecom aim to push home robots past 1M units: The Shenzhen robotics maker signed the strategic pact with Tianyi Telecom Terminals on November 9, also setting 100,000-unit milestones for highly biomimetic and wheeled humanoid robots. The targets cover the wider industry, not just their own shipments.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

SEA healthtech funding fell 85% in two years. AI hasn’t rescued it: Funding dropped from US$397M in 2023 to US$59.7M in 2025. The author argues founders must prove paying customers, measurable value and repeatable deployments, because unpaid hospital pilots are not product-market fit.

Why SEA healthtech struggles for funding despite the AI boom: Regional healthtech funding fell from US$397 million in 2023 to US$59.7 million in 2025. The author argues founders must prove paying customers, repeatable deployments and measurable value, not just impressive AI demos.

The Indonesian tax traps foreign startups underestimate: New PTs lost access to the 0.5% turnover tax in April 2026. The author flags permanent establishment risk from sales-closing local hires, 20% withholding without treaty paperwork, and low transfer pricing thresholds.

One input window is replacing dashboards, but code must check AI: Lobby founder Serge Berezhnoy runs operations through an agent on a Linux server. After a model pitched a cat-meme creator as a beauty influencer, his team moved validation into deterministic code.

AI became my extra team member, but it still needs managing: The Wellness Insider founder Melissa Fann uses AI for first drafts, campaign plans and sponsorship pitches. Her verdict: vague instructions produce vague results, and responsibility for errors still sits with her.

Founders stuck on ‘almost’ are deferring a loss, not stalling: Priyanka Raina argues indecision shields founders from closing off possible futures. Rather than listing obstacles, she has clients picture the decided state vividly until the pull of that future outweighs the fear.

The post Ecosystem Roundup: Nvidia board probes Jensen Huang over affair with Megaspeed exec appeared first on e27.

Along Indonesia’s coasts, smallholder farmers tie seaweed to lines strung across shallow water. A few hundred kilometres inland, other smallholders watch El Niño bake their rice paddies.

Jakarta-based AquaBloom wants the first group’s harvest to rescue the second group’s yields, and it now has fresh capital to test whether that idea scales.

The agri-biotech startup has raised an undisclosed seed round led by Spiral Ventures, with participation from Potato Impact Partners (PIP), Archipelago VC and several angels.

The money will go into expanding manufacturing capacity, R&D and field trials, and distribution across Indonesia.

Also Read: Thirty climate tech startups in Southeast Asia that would rather build than pledge

Founded in 2024 by CEO Michelle Arsjad, AquaBloom makes seaweed-based biostimulants for crops and feed additives for livestock. It previously raised from Altrui Investment Management, among others.

Indonesia ships the seaweed, and the value with it

Indonesia is the world’s second-largest seaweed producer after China, yet most of the crop leaves as a low-priced commodity. According to UNCTAD, close to two-thirds of the country’s seaweed exports are raw, which caps how much value stays at home.

Between January and October 2025, Indonesia exported US$264.6 million worth of seaweed, mostly dried seaweed and carrageenan, with China the dominant buyer at US$183.6 million.

Jakarta knows this. In October, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan urged faster seaweed downstreaming so the commodity is turned into value-added products rather than shipped out raw. AquaBloom is pitching itself as one small answer to that policy itch.

Biostimulants are not fertilisers. Rather than feeding the plant directly, they help it absorb nutrients more efficiently and cope with stresses such as heat and drought. The promise for farmers is better yields with less synthetic fertiliser, which matters when input costs swing and subsidised supply is unreliable.

A pitch built on yield, and on El Niño

The target customer is the smallholder who has been squeezed from both sides: rising costs and an increasingly erratic climate. Other startups have spotted the same pressure point, from low-emission rice farming to precision agri-drones.

“Smallholder farmers need and deserve tools designed for the realities they face, especially as the climate makes farming less predictable,” Arsjad says. “The seaweed we use is grown by smallholder farmers along Indonesia’s coasts. I find it beautiful that smallholder farmers at sea can help smallholder farmers on land grow stronger crops.”

Also Read: Life Lab Resources grabs US$1M to turn food waste into aquaculture feed

The company says its products have been validated on almost 30 crops across more than 40 field trials in Indonesia, with yield improvements of 20 to 30 per cent. It points to rice plots hit by El Niño this September, where treated paddies showed taller shoots and more tillering than adjacent control plots.

Those are striking numbers although AquaBloom has not share the details such as who ran each trial, across how many seasons, or how results varied by crop. Yield gains in a drought year can look very different in a normal one.

Why the investors signed the cheque

Spiral Ventures’s Irawan Ganda, Partner and Head of Southeast Asia, points to the regulatory groundwork: three products already registered for sale in Indonesia and third-party trials backing the yield claims. He also highlights a team whose product people came out of Bayer, Syngenta and Corteva. Spiral plans to open doors to Japanese and regional agriculture groups.

PIP’s Investment Lead Tessa Charupatanapongse cites the product’s range across almost 30 crops and the distribution networks already reaching smallholders.

The most telling detail comes from Archipelago VC’s Principal Olivier Lentze. His firm first met Arsjad in 2025, before AquaBloom had earned a single rupiah. Over the following 18 months, he says, the team landed larger-volume clients, drove farmer adoption and increased production while holding prices accessible. This means AquaBloom’s commercial track record is roughly a year and a half old.

Imported incumbents, and the hard part of selling to smallholders

AquaBloom’s main argument against rivals is provenance. Established seaweed biostimulant brands sold in Indonesia are largely imported. Globally, Canada’s Acadian Plant Health and South Africa’s Kelpak have built businesses on cold-water kelp, while India’s Sea6 Energy works with tropical seaweed. The agrochemical majors also run biologicals divisions. A local product made from local seaweed, tuned to local crops, could undercut imports on price, but the incumbents have deeper pockets and longer trial histories.

The tougher fight may be distribution. Indonesia’s first generation of agritech learned that reaching smallholders is expensive and extending credit to them can be fatal. Farmers also have to be persuaded to pay for an input whose benefits are less visible than fertiliser’s, in a sector already battling a youth exodus from farming.

Also Read: Why Indonesia’s agritech winners will be phygital, not purely digital

Some in the sector argue that the farmer need not always be the one paying, with offtakers, retailers or corporates footing part of the bill. AquaBloom’s plan to grow through retail partners, and Spiral’s push towards regional agriculture groups, hint at that route. A strategic buyer may also be the likeliest exit, since Southeast Asian agritech is arguably better built for acquisitions than IPOs.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, AquaBloom plans to scale production and widen retail distribution. Investors in Southeast Asian climate tech have heard plenty of impact stories. The one that matters here will be told by a shallot grower deciding whether to buy a second bottle.

The post AquaBloom raises seed funding to turn Indonesia’s seaweed into climate armour for farmers appeared first on e27.

Subscription businesses have spent the past two decades making revenue more predictable. Instead of selling a product once and persuading the customer to buy again, they persuade the customer to keep paying every month or every year. That creates an important advantage: once the subscription has started, continuing to pay usually requires no decision at all. Stopping does.

Research published in the American Economic Review shows how valuable that inertia can be. Across 10 large subscription services, monthly retention fell four times faster when customers were forced to make an active renewal decision. The researchers estimated that consumer inertia increased seller revenue by 87 to 120 per cent on average, depending on the model used.

AI agents could change this advantage by giving continuous attention to every recurring payment, checking whether the service is still being used, whether the price has risen and whether a better alternative exists. Recurring billing starts to become recurring justification.

The subscriptions most exposed are those we stop thinking about

Some subscriptions pay for products customers use constantly and consciously. A Spotify user who listens every day does not need an agent to explain why they are paying. Others, including gyms, dating apps, creative software and some media products, are useful intermittently, so the customer’s need can fade before the payment stops.

A third group is more exposed. PDF tools, résumé services, travel apps, photo utilities or mod-download services may solve a problem that lasts minutes, days or weeks while billing continues for months.

RevenueCat’s 2026 analysis of more than 115,000 subscription apps and over US$16 billion of revenue shows how different these businesses already are. Productivity apps had a median first annual renewal rate of only 23 per cent, while business applications were substantially stickier. AI apps also retained monthly subscribers worse after 12 months, at 6.1 per cent compared with 9.5 per cent for non-AI apps. The key distinction is whether the customer’s need itself genuinely recurs.

Agents make that easier to see by combining the recurring charge with renewal terms, actual use and available alternatives. Instead of requiring the customer to assemble the information, the agent can reduce it to one decision: keep, downgrade, switch, renegotiate or cancel.

Also Read: AI agents broke into 100 firms for pocket change. SEA’s online shops fit the target profile

Losing customers can make the remaining customers more expensive

Subscription businesses often benefit from customers who continue paying while using very little of what they bought.

Gyms provide an easy example. Research on US health-club members found that people on monthly contracts attended only 4.3 times a month on average. They were effectively paying more than US$17 per visit when a US$10 pay-per-visit option was available. If an agent repeatedly compares the membership fee with actual attendance, those low-use members should be more likely to question whether the subscription still makes sense.

The members who remain are more likely to be the people who actually use the gym, so revenue can fall much faster than visits. The gym still needs enough equipment, floor space and staff to serve them, worsening the economics from both directions.

The same effect can appear in software. A company might buy 1,000 licences even though only 600 employees use the product seriously. If an agent cuts the contract to 650 seats, the supplier loses 35 per cent of its paid seats but may lose very little actual usage. For software running on the customer’s computer, that is mainly a revenue problem. For cloud services and AI tools, where use creates real compute costs, it can become a margin problem as well.

Price increases create another value test

A company facing that squeeze may raise prices, but AI agents make that harder too. A customer might ignore a service increasing from US$10 to US$13 a month. An agent can immediately compare the higher price with recent usage and competing products.

That creates a feedback loop. Low-use customers leave, average usage among the remaining customers rises, margins come under pressure, and the supplier raises prices. Those increases trigger another round of comparison, cancellation and switching. A company could therefore maintain headline revenue while the economics underneath it deteriorate.

Also Read: Banks want AI agents to move money, as long as someone is accountable

Some products may stop making sense as subscriptions

This eventually raises a bigger question: should some products be subscriptions at all?

Software companies have spent years moving from packaged products toward subscriptions because recurring revenue is more attractive than repeatedly asking customers to buy a new version. Agents could push some products back in the opposite direction. If a desktop utility costs almost nothing to provide after installation and customers only need it occasionally, charging US$60 for a permanent licence may become more attractive than repeatedly asking an agent to approve another US$10 monthly payment.

Cloud products face a different problem because heavy usage has a real cost. They may move toward credits, metered consumption or subscriptions combined with usage charges. NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW already limits Performance and Ultimate customers to 100 hours of premium playtime each month, with additional hours available separately. The company says the limit helps maintain quality, speed and shorter queue times.

Gaming illustrates the difference clearly. A US$70 game running mainly on the customer’s console creates relatively little continuing computing cost for the publisher. A cloud gaming service must keep paying for processors, bandwidth and infrastructure every time the customer plays. If low-use subscribers disappear while power users remain, outright purchases, expansions, sequels and usage-based pricing become relatively more attractive.

Businesses face the same mechanism at a much larger scale

The same logic applies to corporate spending, where hundreds or thousands of subscriptions can accumulate. xAI gave its Grok procurement agent access to contracts, spending and usage information. It found 43 paid software seats with no activity for 90 days and identified more than US$100,000 of direct savings across the spending it reviewed.

This turns occasional procurement reviews into a continuous process. An agent can check unused seats, overlapping products, alternative suppliers, renewal prices and whether the company is still buying what employees actually use. The relationship between employee numbers and software revenue consequently becomes less secure.

Gartner calls a broader version of this “agentic arbitrage” and estimates that up to US$234 billion of enterprise application spending could be exposed by 2030, around 20 per cent of projected enterprise application software-as-a-service spending. That does not mean US$234 billion disappears. It means a very large pool of recurring expenditure becomes easier to question, optimise and renegotiate.

Also Read: AI doesn’t need crypto, AI agents do

The subscription economy is larger than it looks

US consumers report spending roughly US$1,300 to US$1,900 a year on subscriptions and recurring services, depending on the survey and definition used. US software-as-a-service revenue alone was estimated at more than US$160 billion in 2025. The affected spending extends beyond obvious subscriptions. An agent may not cancel electricity or car insurance, but it can compare tariffs, shop an insurance renewal or find a cheaper mobile plan.

That does not mean subscriptions disappear. Services providing strong continuing value should survive repeated scrutiny, while bundles may become more valuable because they give customers several reasons to keep paying.

What becomes harder to defend is recurring revenue supported by inattention, underuse and the effort required to reconsider a purchase. The subscription economy was built around recurring billing. AI agents may turn it into an economy of recurring justification.

Read a more detailed version of this article, with full sources, here.

Read “Abundance Economics: The Economic Mechanisms of the AI Age” here, or find more on the research framework behind it here.

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Grab started life in Malaysia as a taxi-booking app. Fourteen years on, it is heading back to its birthplace with a far heavier load: AI data centres.

SoftBank Group and Grab Holdings have signed joint development agreements with Petroleum Sarawak (PETROS), the Sarawak state oil and gas company, to build AI infrastructure across Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia. The initial seed capital is US$1.85 billion: US$1 billion from SoftBank, US$750 million from Grab and US$100 million from PETROS.

Also Read: Malaysia’s sovereign AI bet: Local context becomes the next startup moat

The long-term target is five gigawatts or more of AI compute, which is where the maths gets interesting. Industry estimates routinely put the all-in cost of a single gigawatt of AI capacity, chips included, in the tens of billions of US dollars. The seed cheque, in other words, is a down payment on a project whose final bill nobody has published.

From a Kuching handshake to binding cheques

A month ago, this was a statement of intent. In October, the three parties signed a framework agreement in Kuching to explore an AI platform in Sarawak, with no capital attached. The new agreements, the companies say, carry binding development and funding obligations.

Binding, with caveats. The joint venture entities do not yet exist, and each party’s investment terms still hinge on definitive agreements, due diligence, regulatory approvals, and securing land, affordable power, connectivity and contracted customers. Money will be released in stages, tied to development and customer milestones. The risk disclosures run longer than the announcement.

The two projects are built differently. In Sarawak, SoftBank is the majority partner, putting up US$800 million of the US$1 billion initial investment, with Grab and PETROS adding US$100 million each. Grab holds an option to raise its stake, diluting SoftBank, which would still keep control.

On the peninsula, the roles flip. Grab is the founding shareholder with US$650 million of the US$850 million seed, SoftBank adds US$200 million, and Grab leads development. Further growth is meant to come from third-party equity and non-recourse project financing, debt repaid from the project’s own cash flows rather than its sponsors’ balance sheets. The companies have not said where on the peninsula the facilities will sit, a notable silence given how Johor has absorbed much of the region’s data centre spillover, and the scrutiny that came with it.

A superapp takes on a power-hungry side hustle

For Grab, US$750 million is a hefty commitment for a business whose bread and butter is rides, meals and, increasingly, loans. Its third-quarter results showed net profit of just US$18 million against a record Adjusted EBITDA of US$237 million, while gross cash liquidity slipped to US$7.1 billion as buybacks drew on the pile.

Grab is also on the hook for its US$1.49 billion deal for 60 per cent of Atome Financial. Add compute to the list and its capital now chases driver incentives, a fast-growing loan book, share repurchases and data centres. Investors will want to know which gets priority when cash tightens.

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s US$1T digital dream slips five years, and AI is the new reason to keep believing

Grab’s case is that it needs the compute itself, to speed up localised AI products for its users. Co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan will oversee both projects while continuing to run Grab, with dedicated teams handling day-to-day operations. Grab’s board has approved the arrangement. Still, running a Nasdaq-listed superapp and two infrastructure ventures is a heavy load for one executive, and the overlap invites related-party questions: Grab will be shareholder, likely customer and, through its CEO, steward.

SoftBank, one of Grab’s longest-standing backers, has sweetened the deal by agreeing in principle to a five-year lock-up on Grab shares held directly by a SoftBank entity, subject to customary exceptions. Lock-ups rarely feature in infrastructure announcements. This one reads as a signal that the partnership is as much about cementing a shareholder relationship as about megawatts.

Malaysia’s compute queue keeps getting longer

The consortium joins a crowded line. Just last week, Google committed US$15 billion to Malaysian digital infrastructure across 2027 and 2028. Microsoft has pledged US$2.2 billion, AWS about US$6.2 billion through 2037, and Oracle US$6.5 billion for a public cloud region. Regionally, AI infrastructure dealmaking hit a record this year as Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand chase the same capacity.

What sets this consortium apart is its business model. Hyperscalers build for their own clouds; SoftBank and Grab plan to build capacity and then court hyperscalers as tenants, alongside governments, multinationals and small businesses. That makes demand the central risk. Without signed customers, five gigawatts is a forecast, not a facility.

The demand case leans on the e-Conomy SEA 2026 report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, which puts per capita AI usage in the region’s six largest economies at about a tenth of US levels, with usage projected to grow up to 60-fold by 2030. Projections of that magnitude have a habit of being revised.

Sarawak’s gas, and the numbers nobody gave

Sarawak’s pull is energy. PETROS brings power supply and local supply chain links, and the project is pitched as serving both the state’s Post COVID-19 Development Strategy 2030 and Putrajaya’s AI Nation 2030 plan. The companies promise facilities that follow Malaysia’s renewable energy guidelines and use designs that cut water use and reliance on local grids.

Also Read: SEA’s AI boom has a water problem it cannot offset away

They did not say how much power or water the sites will draw, or how much of that power will come from gas. Google, by contrast, pledged last week to pay its own electricity bill and fund lower household tariffs near its campuses. The communities living beside Malaysia’s next server halls will want similar numbers.

The promised high-value jobs in engineering, design and technical fields, plus talk of advanced manufacturing, also arrive without figures. Malaysia wants 300,000 AI jobs by 2030, yet data centres are famously lean to run once built.

For now, Malaysia gets another blockbuster headline and Grab gets a seat at the infrastructure table. Whether this becomes five gigawatts or a well-funded pilot will be decided by the milestones buried in the fine print.

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