Tech that Asia should watch out for in 2024

The New Year will likely herald interest rate cuts, triggering a fresh new flow of money chasing not only listed tech companies but also unicorns or unlisted tech firms with a valuation of over US$1 billion ($1.3 billion) and smaller start-ups. Nearly two years of interest rate increases have stifled gestation tech ventures, starving start-ups from Singapore to Shanghai and San Francisco. The start of a new normalised rates cycle will help boost funding for emerging technologies, particularly anything related to AI. 

Here’s what you in Asia need to watch out for in global tech in the New Year: Breakthroughs in key segments of tech — AI and robotics, advanced semiconductor chips, electric vehicles or EVs, new EV batteries and electric air mobility.   

The big tech story of 2024 will again be AI. The world has moved from being wowed by ChatGPT to what it will be used for. Students use it as a learning tool, journalists use it as a search tool, and law firms use it to research legal precedents or work young law associates or paralegals used to do or help draft business presentations. Aside from saving time and improving productivity, generative AI can help businesses enhance customer experience.

Over the next 12 months, you should see the five big players — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Elon Musk — mark their own AI territory. The drama at Open AI in November, which saw CEO Sam Altman ousted by the nonprofit’s board only to be reinstated days after the staff’s open rebellion, was just a preview of how the AI battles will play out over the next few years. Microsoft has a US$13 billion investment for a 49% capped economic interest in Open AI.

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In the aftermath of the Altman soap opera, the software giant now has an observer seat on the Open AI’s board. However, despite its ties with Open AI and Altman, Microsoft doesn’t have a big lead in AI. Open AI was the first to unveil its AI chatbot ChatGPT a year ago. That was because Google, which has spent billions over the years on AI research and buying AI firms like DeepMind, was afraid to launch its AI product first. After ChatGPT’s launch, Google fast-tracked its chatbot, Bard. Another firm working on AI foundational models, Anthropic, has a chatbot called Claude. In early December, Google launched Gemini, which is multimodal. That means you can type in text or speak to it explaining a concept, and AI will churn out images, videos, or a business presentation. It is still in the early days, and some of it is not fully baked for prime time, but that’s where this chatbot technology is going. 

Google also introduced ‘Gemini Nano’, which can run on smartphones. Analysts expect Apple will eventually unveil its AI strategy, and the iPhone will be at its core. Oh, one more thing: Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea, used to work for Google. 

AI wars
Aside from its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft has its own Copilot business chatbot. In mid-November, Amazon launched “Q,” its Pilot-rival AI chatbot for business, as it tries to shake off the perception that it is lagging in the push to take advantage of AI.

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Meta, meanwhile, has taken a completely different approach to AI by going the open-source route rather than the proprietary model that its peers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have chosen. Open source means anyone can contribute and build upon Meta’s code. 

There is a reason Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is taking generative AI so seriously. He sees it as an existential threat to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Here’s the thing: Generative AI can be used as a messaging app and, therefore, has the power to disrupt Meta in a way that it can’t disrupt Apple, Microsoft or Amazon.
Meta has released its large language model Llama 2 for free with a limited license. He has also released messaging bots inside WhatsApp and Messenger, each with different personalities played by rapper and actor Snoop Dog and basketball star Dwayne Wade. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI, now has his own new AI firm, X.AI. Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth of US$223 billion who sees AI as “one of the biggest threats to humanity”, is raising US$1 billion for a new AI venture instead of funding it himself. Musk recently unveiled Grok, an AI chatbot, or his answer to ChatGPT. Musk bought Twitter (since renamed X) a year ago for US$44 billion. It’s now a shadow of its former self. But it does have a treasure trove of data which Musk can use to train his new AI models.

AI firms, of course, need state-of-the-art chips for parallel processing to train their large language models. Top-of-the-line AI chips like Nvidia’s H-100 can cost as much as US$40,000 per piece. Nvidia, of course, has an 80% share of the total AI chip market, and right now, it can’t make enough of them to keep up with insatiable demand. Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, recently unveiled its MI300 AI chip.

AMD has partnered with Microsoft to put its AI chips in its Azure cloud servers. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Elon Musk’s X.AI are all designing their own AI chips, which they hope TSMC or Samsung Electronics will make for them. The battle to supply AI chips will get more fierce in 2024, though it is likely that Nvidia, which has a huge head start, will continue to dominate the arena for a while. 

The New Year could also see traction in a new generation of advanced semiconductors with the production of 2 nanometre or 2nm chips that put 50 billion transistors, each the size of roughly five atoms, on a space no bigger than your fingernail. Chinese electronics firm Huawei shocked the world by producing a smartphone using a chip made of 7nm technology. China is barred from importing chip equipment capable of making chips smaller than 9nm. The smaller the chip, the faster and more powerful it is.

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The US has restricted the sale of advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photolithography machines that are used to make high-end chips, but Huawei was able to use another Western technology, deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems, to make 7nm chips used in Huawei Mate 50 smartphone. Apple’s latest iPhone 15 Pro uses 3nm chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. TSMC has already begun testing its 2nm chips, though commercial production will unlikely begin until 2025. China is still at least five years behind the US. Expect the  US-China Chip War to worsen next year with stricter enforcement of state-of-the-art technology.

Lord of the wings
2024 was supposed to be the inflection year for battery electric vehicles in the US to take off finally. Higher interest rates, slowing the US economy, and some consumer resistance have weighed on the sales of EVs.

Until recently, legacy automakers like GM, Ford, and Volkswagen struggled to sell EVs. Lately, even Tesla sales growth has dipped despite aggressive price cuts. As the US economy improves and rate cuts take hold, EV sales will likely rebound with a vengeance.

The EV industry is doubling down on innovation. A key area is batteries. Car buyers want a better range so they don’t have to look around for a charging station. They also want even faster superchargers. It takes a minute to fill a petrol tank. They don’t want to wait more than five or 10 minutes to fully charge an EV. Toyota and Honda, which have been EV laggards, are working on lighter solid-state batteries that can be charged in a few minutes. Sila, a US firm run by former Tesla engineers, has patented a silicon powdered battery for up to 800km range and can be charged in just 10 minutes.

The incoming New Year will be when we finally see traction in the much-vaunted advanced air mobility revolution. During the 2024 Paris Olympic Games in July, German firm VoloCity’s two-seater electric vertical take-off and landing eVTOL aircraft will begin ferrying passengers from Olympic venues to the city and back. The success of eVTOLs in Paris will likely pave the way for the US Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, to announce a timeline for eVTOL commercial flights. Unless the FAA delays certification, manufacturing of eVTOL aircraft is expected to begin in the second half of 2024, with commercial flight launch in the first half of 2025.

The New Year will also mark the thawing of the long-frozen IPO market, allowing more unicorns to list on the tech-heavy Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange in 2024. The IPO candidates are Internet discussion and social news aggregation website Reddit, payments firm Klarna, ticketing giant StubHub, car-rental marketplace Turo and Singapore-based Chinese online e-commerce firm Shein. The biggest is likely to be payment processor Stripe, which was once valued at US$95 billion but recently raised at a US$65 billion valuation. 

From Mag Seven to the Next 15
Global tech stocks will shine again in 2024. After a thorough thrashing in 2022, when the benchmark S&P 500 Index fell 19.4%, and the Nasdaq 100 fell 32.6%, tech stocks have had a good year so far, though much of the upside has been due to a surge in the top seven US tech stocks.

The ‘Magnificent Seven, ‘ as they have been dubbed, are up 71% this year, while the other 493 stocks in the US benchmark S&P 500 Index have been up just 6% since January. The ‘Mag Seven’ now make up a third of the S&P 500, up nearly 22% this year, while the Nasdaq 100, representing the top 100 listed tech stocks in the US, is up 50.4% this year.

Expect Big Tech or ‘Mag Seven’ to do well again in 2024. Far bigger gains are likely to come from the next 15 largest tech companies rather than this past year’s leaders as investors rotate away from high-priced stocks to those that still have growth but are still trading at reasonable valuations. 

These include communications chips firm Broadcom (run by Penang-born Hock-Eng Tan) which now has market value of half a trillion US dollars, gaming and server chips maker Advanced Micro Devices or AMD, which recently unveiled its own AI chip to compete with Nvidia, software-as-a-service player Adobe, cloud-based software firm Salesforce, streaming supremo Netflix, networking gear maker Cisco, microprocessor giant Intel, chip makers Qualcomm and workflow management firm ServiceNow and ride-hailing platform, Uber whose stocks have lagged as the ‘Mag 7’ stocks ran up but are now starting to catch up with their US peers.

Overall, 2024 is gearing up to be a fairly interesting year for the tech industry and investors.   

 Assif Shameen is a technology and business writer based in North America