On the night shift, the Philippines' call centres meet their replacement

In Manila's BPO towers, agents now share their headsets with AI co-pilots. From the floor, the question is not whether the bots arrive, but who survives them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

·Capital rotates out of US/EU equities into hard ASEAN infrastructure.
·Data centres, power transmission and ports are the three priority lanes.
·Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines absorb the largest allocations.

Sofia M. Reyes · 9 min read

TRAVEL & DINING · TRENDS

After midnight in Manila, a new dining economy is waking up

Driven by shift workers, a creative class on a nocturnal clock and a generation priced out of daytime restaurants, the Philippine capital is building one of Asia's most vital after-dark food scenes.

SUSTAINABILITY · CLIMATE POLICY

Living With the Water: How Manila Is Rebuilding for the Floods to Come

Pumping stations, raised barangays and a sponge-city experiment in Pasig: an on-the-ground report on a megacity choosing adaptation because mitigation arrived too late.

FINANCE · DEALS

Anatomy of a deal: how a $1.4bn fintech merger got done in 70 days

A markets reconstruction of the cross-border tie-up between a Singapore payments firm and a Jakarta digital lender — the bridge loan, the regulatory dance, and the clause that almost killed it.

LIFESTYLE · ART

At Manila's Art Fair, a New Generation Decides What Asia Collects Next

On the ground at Art Fair Philippines, young Filipino collectors are buying Southeast Asian art with conviction — and quietly rewriting whose work the region will value for the next twenty years.

MarketsUpdated 02:58 SGT

Finance

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Deals

Anatomy of a deal: how a $1.4bn fintech merger got done in 70 days

A markets reconstruction of the cross-border tie-up between a Singapore payments firm and a Jakarta digital lender — the bridge loan, the regulatory dance, and the clause that almost killed it.

Daniel R. Whitfield · 8 min

Banking

Technology

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Platforms

The Last Mile Is a Dirt Road: A Super-App's Bet on Rural Vietnam

Urban Vietnam is saturated with ride-hailing and delivery. The next hundred million orders are in the provinces — where the roads, the riders and the economics all break the city playbook.

Thao Nguyen · 9 min

Chips

SK Hynix Pushes HBM4 Into Volume as Samsung Scrambles to Close the Gap

Hana Park · 6 min

Dev

Hands On With Orchestra: An Agent Framework That Finally Respects Your Token Budget

Marcus Halloran · 8 min

Analysis

The Sovereign-Compute Scramble: Why Every Asian Government Suddenly Wants Its Own GPUs

Mei-Lin Tan · 9 min

Analysis

The Ghost Clouds: Inside Southeast Asia's Speculative GPU-Rental Boom

Arif Rahman · 18 min

Southeast Asia's sovereign-AI race finds its first real budgets

Lena Koh · 6 min

Semiconductors

Inside Vietnam's scramble to train 50,000 chip engineers

Nguyen Minh · 7 min

Real Estate

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Development

Walking Jakarta's Reclaimed Edge: A Market Report From the Sinking City

As Indonesia builds a giant sea wall and reclaims new land off its capital, BriefAsia walks the contested waterfront where megaproject ambition, flood defence and property speculation collide.

Arif Rahman · 9 min

Offices

Singapore's Grade-A Towers Fill Up as Older Stock Empties

Jordan Chen · 6 min

Analysis

Hong Kong's Old Towers Face a Retrofit-or-Die Reckoning

Jordan Chen · 8 min

Analysis

The Land Is Cheap. The Power Is Not: Asia's Data-Centre Squeeze

Mei Lin · 9 min

Residential

The Name on the Door: Inside Asia's Branded-Residence Gold Rush

Mei Lin · 18 min

Analysis

Asia's next cycle is being priced in faster than expected

BriefAsia Newsroom · 5 min

Briefing

The signals regional executives are watching this week

BriefAsia Newsroom · 4 min

Sustainability

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Climate Policy

Living With the Water: How Manila Is Rebuilding for the Floods to Come

Pumping stations, raised barangays and a sponge-city experiment in Pasig: an on-the-ground report on a megacity choosing adaptation because mitigation arrived too late.

Sofia M. Reyes · 9 min

Analysis