Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.asiatechreview.com
Welcome back to Asia Tech Review, your curated digest to keep up to date with tech news across Asia.
There aren’t many exits in Southeast Asia, so today’s chance to analyse two IPOs is a rare one. We explore how data centre firm DayOne epitomises the upside/downside of the AI opportunity after it revealed two companies account for 85% of its revenue. We also look at how Mynt is about to have the largest IPO in the Philippines, unless you look at US dollar value.
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In more IPO news from Southeast Asia, data centre operator DayOne is moving ahead with an IPO in New York that could raise up to $5 billion and one particular disclosure in its filing documents stands out.
Most notably, it revealed that one client accounts for nearly 70% of revenue. The Information names that client as ByteDance (TikTok) and it certainly appears that way from DayOne’s own words, emphasis ours:
In 2025 and the six months ended June 30, 2026, our largest customer, a global technology company with a leading short-form video platform serving a worldwide audience, accounted for 69.4% and 69.2%, respectively, of our revenue and our second largest customer represented 12.3% and 15.1%, respectively, of our revenue.
So 85% of revenue comes from two clients.
That’s a rough read, but not a huge shock given that the data centre business is built on long-term customer commitments. You don’t go through the process of acquiring land, developing a centre and all the associated costs without the certainty of revenue. ByteDance and GDS, the parent company behind DayOne, have a long relationship dating back to 2020 when GDS first won the company as a client in China. It created its international business, which became DayOne, in 2022. You’d imagine that a key part was securing ByteDance, which was rapidly expanding overseas with Southeast Asia a key market.
A client like TikTok, which has pledged to spend as much as $25 billion on data centres in Southeast Asia, is clearly potentially very lucrative, but the reliance feeds into concern around the potential impact of an AI bubble.
If the bubble pops, data centre players like DayOne stand to be hurt significantly, as the company itself admits.
“Accordingly, our business has been and we expect will continue to be highly dependent on our relationships with our customers and we expect such customers to continue to account for a large percentage of our revenues and capacity,” it wrote.
DayOne’s revenue climbed from $178.1 million in 2024 to $484.3 million in 2025. That revenue growth continues to accelerate, reaching $512.0 million in the first half of 2026, up from $151.5 million a year earlier. The company remains loss-making with a net loss of $367.1 million in 2025, though it cut that to just $77.2 million in the first half of 2026.
If it takes even a partial slice of TikTok’s $25 billion commitment (assuming the company can even spend that much in the region) it stands to be a huge winner for investors. Let alone if it can grab even more market share based on the prestige of serving such major businesses.
DayOne is said to be aiming for a $20 billion valuation. It claims to work with seven major clients that are tech companies or hyperscalers, with 33% market share in Southeast Asia. It’s a major player in a category that hasn’t been strongly tested in public markets, how will that go?
We’ve already seen how skittish investors can be with Firmus’ $5.5 billion IPO collapsing, despite its backing from Nvidia and others, while AirTrunk is said to have delayed its $1.5 billion Singapore listing. DayOne will believe it is different, and a name like TikTok might help it make the case.
The Philippines is set for a record IPO tomorrow as Mynt, the parent company of GCash, the country’s top digital payments app, will begin trading on 20 October.
The listing is set to raise up to 60.9 billion pesos ($966 million) if the full option for shares is exercised. That’s below the initial range Mynt forecast, but it would be enough to be a national record. F&B brand Monde Nissin, famous for instant noodles, biscuits and more, raised 48.6 billion pesos in its 2021 IPO, which was supported by Singapore’s GIC among others.
In a sign of currency depreciation, Mynt’s IPO could be larger in pesos but lower than Monde Nissin in US dollar terms as the Philippine peso has lost 24% of its dollar value during the period.
Still, Mynt’s listing represents a signal of opportunity for digital business and startups in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia.
While it is true that Mynt is a corporate animal, having been formed by conglomerate Ayala and operator Globe Telecom and backed by the likes of MUFG, Ant Group and Warburg Pincus, others in the space need to point to successful listings and exits if they’re to follow the same path. It’s not clear what employee stock options are like or how large the ESOP pool is, but you’d hope that a good portion of the exit will be shared internally among staff.
Exits are what feeds an ecosystem. They allow investors to return funds (a real challenge in Southeast Asia) and employees to make financial gains that justify the decision to work at a startup rather than taking a corporate job. Often, these staff jump out and form new companies, become angel investors or even start their own funds full time, all of which makes the startup landscape richer.
Employees at corporate startups like Ayala are unlikely to have life-changing wealth from the listing, the incentives there don’t work like that and an IPO is usually a firm target, but it may be a boost to outside investors looking into the Philippines and give other companies in the country cause to believe they, too, can make it to a domestic IPO. The more companies that do it, the more those ecosystem effects will be felt.
The listing should also serve to inspire a country like Thailand, where another payments player backed by Ant, Ascend Money, is said to be considering an IPO. Back in the Philippines, GCash’s rival, Maya, is said to be weighing a listing in 2027. The momentum generated by tomorrow’s listing could be powerful.
SoftBank is weighing an acquisition of US security-services group Allied Universal that could value the business at about $30 billion including debt, as Masayoshi Son looks to deploy AI-powered robots in physical security [Bloomberg]
Hyderabad- and Austin-based RapidCanvas raised $29 million, taking total funding to $52.5 million, to combine AI agents and engineers for custom enterprise software [Economic Times]
Accenture is reviewing a potential sale of its Greater China operations that could be valued at up to $1.5 billion, after receiving unsolicited interest [FT]
Kioxia’s market value has fallen to 21 trillion yen ($134 billion), from 60 trillion yen ($383 billion) in June, after a global chip sell-off and rising Chinese competition knocked its shares [Nikkei Asia]
Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT expects nine-month net profit of 131 billion to 132.5 billion yuan ($19.6 billion to $19.8 billion), reversing a loss a year earlier as the global memory boom lifts prices [Bloomberg]
Indian billionaire family offices are backing homegrown AI startups as the country tries to narrow the gap with the US and China, with at least six local AI companies now valued above $1 billion [Bloomberg]
Malaysia has unveiled six locally developed chips expected to generate 300 million ringgit ($74 million) in annual sales, part of its push beyond semiconductor packaging and testing into chip design [The Edge Malaysia]
Alibaba is testing an AI assistant for Taobao and Tmall merchants as it prepares to embed Qwen across its e-commerce operations next year [SCMP]
DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash-1017, claiming faster task completion, shorter answers and improved benchmark performance [Hugging Face]
Samsung will use TSMC’s 3-nanometre process for the base die in Nvidia’s next-generation custom high-bandwidth memory, ending its practice of making both components in-house [Seoul Economic Daily]
China has proposed export controls on 23 advanced AI technologies, including model weights, source code, chip designs and computing systems that exceed set performance thresholds [Bloomberg]
Taiwan plans to put advanced semiconductors and AI servers under export controls, bringing it closer to US restrictions on China and making unlicensed shipments a criminal offence [Bloomberg]
India’s CERT-In said AI agents breached live systems and accessed confidential business records during tests, beyond their authorised tasks, though it did not name the providers or affected organisations [Reuters]
Southeast Asia is being pulled between Washington’s Pax Silica supply-chain coalition and Beijing’s AI-cooperation group, with Singapore and the Philippines joining the former while Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Myanmar back the latter [Nikkei Asia]
A Chinese court upheld a prison sentence for the operator of pirate-streaming site Aiyifan, while a US judge awarded iQIYI $1.96 million in damages but declined to transfer the platform’s domains [TorrentFreak]
Google has warned that a suspected China-linked group exploited a flaw in BeyondTrust’s Remote Support software, which could expose credentials and give attackers control of affected devices [Reuters]
Japan’s electricity network is increasingly exposed to cyberattacks through its 80 million connected smart meters, as hackers target companies and infrastructure linked to the grid [Nikkei Asia]
