☕️ Good morning friends,

Every time we get into a taxi in China, it's accompanied by a guessing game of how to open the door.

From 2027, there will be more buttons and handles again! We still prefer riding our bikes though.

More on that in today's Top Bit.

Also in today's issue:

• Blackstone pumps $1.2 billion: India's GPU startup Neysa scales to 20,000 chips

• Alibaba fires back: Qwen3.5 with 397 billion parameters, 60% cheaper

• Toto secret weapon: Washlet manufacturer also produces high-tech ceramics for chips

P.S.: 500 robotics companies in 60 days, a destroyed restaurant, and the truth about China's robotics boom - our new podcast episode is live.

📺 YouTube

India’s IT sector under pressure: “AI fears” have hit Indian tech stocks, wiping about $56 billion off their market value. Bullish investors see the sell-off as a buying opportunity for companies that can prove they will continue to grow in the age of AI. For the industry, this is turning into a real stress test.

TOP BIT

China: buttons instead of touchscreens in cars

Radical shift in the world's most technologically advanced car market: China is ending the era of buttonless cockpits.

China's Ministry of Industry has published a draft of new safety regulations mandating physical buttons for life-critical functions.

From July 1, 2027, all newly manufactured vehicles in the People's Republic must have "real" controls again.

The new mandatory buttons

The following functions may no longer be operated exclusively via touchscreens:

• Gear shift and turn signals

• Hazard lights and window controls

• Emergency call (eCall)

• Minimum size: 10 x 10 mm per button

The reason: distraction at the wheel. In many electric cars, even mechanical functions run through the central display. In the Tesla Model Y, the driver has to tap the display to change gears.

Not the first reversal

China is systematically cleaning up design trends that are problematic from a safety perspective:

Retractable door handles can jam after accidents and trap occupants. Yoke steering wheels don't meet airbag standards – according to the ministry, the steering column is involved in 46% of all driver injuries.

China is not alone. The European testing organization Euro NCAP has also already announced that from 2026, it will no longer award five stars if safety-critical functions can only be operated via screens.

• The message is clear: futuristic aesthetics are all well and good – but not at the expense of safety.

📊 All details & data: Bloomberg, CarExpert

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INFOGRAPHIC

Surprise?

What's your take on these numbers? Let us know here.

MARKET BIT

Blackstone leads $1.2B round in Indian GPU startup Neysa

A Blackstone-led consortium is putting up to $600 million in equity into Neysa, an Indian startup founded in 2023 that builds and operates GPU-based AI infrastructure for enterprises.

• On top of that, Neysa plans to secure another $600 million in debt financing, bringing the total to $1.2 billion for a company that isn't even three years
  old.

🤝 Blackstone's Amit Dixit, head of Asia private equity, will partner with Neysa co-founder and CEO Sharad Sanghi to scale the business.

The details

Neysa deploys GPU clusters inside India - for banks, tech firms, hospitals and government agencies. The fresh capital will fund the rollout of more than 20,000 GPUs across the country, specifically for AI training and high-performance computing.

Joining Blackstone in the round are Teachers' Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE and Nexus.

The key thing here: Neysa designs and operates its systems entirely within India. Data stays onshore. Modi's government is pushing hard on "sovereign compute" under the IndiaAI Mission banner.

The bigger picture

For Blackstone, Neysa fills the India gap in a global AI infrastructure portfolio that already includes QTS and CoreWeave in the US, AirTrunk across APAC and Firmus in Australia.

The timing could hardly have been better. On the same day, Adani announced $100 billion for AI data centers by 2035. Modi had flown in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google's Sundar Pichai and half a dozen other tech chiefs for the India AI Summit in New Delhi. AMD simultaneously signed an expanded AI partnership with Tata.

India is clearly serious about this. Whether the country can actually build compute capacity as fast as the cheques are flying is the real question.

👉 Full story: Bloomberg, DealStreet Asia, CRN Asia

HIGHLIGHTS 

🇨🇳 Alibaba fires up Qwen3.5 in the AI agent war: Alibaba Cloud has unveiled its new open-source flagship model with 397 billion parameters, 60% cheaper and eight times more efficient than its predecessor. New agent capabilities allow Qwen3.5 to autonomously operate desktop and mobile apps. Alibaba needs the momentum, as Doubao and DeepSeek currently dominate China’s chatbot market.

🇯🇵 Toilet maker as an AI dark horse: UK activist fund Palliser Capital has taken a stake in Japanese washlet manufacturer Toto and sees 55% upside. The reason: beyond ceramic thrones, Toto also produces electrostatic chucks used in NAND fabrication and is, according to Palliser, “the most undervalued AI memory beneficiary” on the market. Toilet seats and semiconductors under one roof may sound absurd, but hidden plays like this are exactly what activists love.

🇨🇳 Brain Prize laureate moves from Germany to China: Neuroscientist Arthur Konnerth has permanently joined Shenzhen Bay Laboratory. Konnerth is considered a pioneer of the patch-clamp method, a foundational technique in modern brain research. Shenzhen has heavily invested in research infrastructure in recent years and is now among the most attractive global hubs for neuroscience.

🇯🇵 Renesas and GlobalFoundries to build automotive chips: Japan’s largest automotive chip designer and the US contract manufacturer plan to jointly produce semiconductors for driver assistance, EVs, and communications starting mid-2026. Production will take place at GF sites in the US, Germany, Singapore, and China. A potential transfer of GF manufacturing technology to Japan could enable Renesas to produce more advanced logic chips in-house for the first time.

FORTUNE COOKIE

We are still shocked by how robots became part of this year’s CNY celebration. 🐲

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