A more than US$40 billion boost for China’s semiconductor sector could be on the way, as reports – officially unconfirmed but widely reported – suggest a new state-backed investment fund for the sector is to be launched by the country.

Smartphone shipments in Indonesia declined for the eighth quarter in a row but analyst company IDC forecast a better H2 for the market as shipments will stabilise.  

King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Development & Management Company and Orange Business, the enterprise division of Orange, have signed a deal through which Orange Business will supply a smart city platform for KAFD.

Huawei opened a cloud data centre in Saudi Arabia’s capital city Riyadh, a move to grow its cloud services in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa.

Green energy is a regular – indeed necessary – part of most data centre development announcements these days. In fact in two recent cases – in Kenya and India – it seems to be the main event.

Following last week’s news that 5G spectrum is finally about to go on sale in Argentina, the country's three main mobile operators have been quick to express concern at the terms laid down by regulator Enacom – and now have been joined by industry association the GSMA.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China Mobile.

State-owned Indian operators Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) have signed an MoU to synergies their operations and provide pan-Indian telecom services, reported Economic Times (ET).

Vanuatu operator Wave has partnered with local ISP 3 Link to launch an affordable 5G broadband offering in 2024.

Telemor, the Timor-Leste subsidiary of Viettel, has renewed its eight-year agreement with SES to provide enhanced mobile connectivity for consumers and enterprises in the market.

Chip manufacturer Intel revealed plans to invest US$1.2 billion into its Costa Rican business over the next two years, to fuel development in next-generation technologies.

ZTE has partnered with Thailand’s AIS (Advanced Info Service) on the world’s first dynamic RIS (Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface) trial in an mmWave network at the AZ centre in Bangkok.

Operator group Millicom announced its CEO Mauricio Ramos will be promoted to executive chair of the board, as former chair Jose Antonio Rios departs effective immediately.  

Inception, the artificial intelligence (AI) applied research unit of UAE technology group G42, has announced the open-source release of Jais, described as the world’s highest-quality Arabic large language model (LLM). Jais is a 13-billion parameter model trained on a newly developed 395-billion-token Arabic and English dataset.

For mobile operators, problems with the power grid can be expensive to manage. Now Vodacom in South Africa has announce a novel solution. It’s called virtual wheeling.