Asia In Brief India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades.

The nation’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman yesterday announced the schemes in the nation’s annual budget, which included a proposed tax holiday – extending until 2047 – for “any foreign company who provides services to any part of the world outside India by procuring datacenter services in India.”

Sitharaman said the measure recognizes “the need to enable critical infrastructure and boost investment in datacenters,” and will be available if services are procured through an Indian reseller.

This is clearly a plan to make India an attractive place from which to serve cloud workloads for customers outside the country. Datacenter operators and their customers will doubtless want to understand the legal implications of storing data in India before rushing to adopt the scheme.

Two other measures in the budget are also notable.

One suggests a five-year tax break for companies that import manufacturing equipment for use by an Indian company, a plan that would help to accelerate development of the nation’s high-tech manufacturing sector.

The other is a new lure for skilled workers who move to India, by exempting any income they earn offshore from Indian taxes. Only workers who stay in India for five years will get the tax break.

The Register finds this one fascinating given that many skilled Indian tech workers have left the country.

NTT looks to Vietnam for offshore talent

Japanese tech services giant NTT Data last week announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Vietnamese software development house CMC Global, “to strengthen offshore development capabilities for the Japanese market by leveraging Vietnam’s IT talent.”

“By combining NTT DATA’s customer base and expertise in large-scale system development, NTT DATA Vietnam’s extensive experience in offshore development leveraging its development management capabilities and CMC Global’s technological strength and globally standardized development quality, the partnership aims to enhance responsiveness to advanced technologies such as AI and execution capabilities for large-scale projects, while delivering flexible and competitive services in the global market,” the announcement of the tie-up states.

Vietnam is trying hard to grow its information technology industry, including manufacturing and services.

Japan opens Earth Data to AI

Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency last week announced the release of sample code for model context protocol (MCP) for Claude Desktop allowing access to the API it provides for Earth observation data.

The release means users can now access the data through a chatbot interface.

JAXA’s data spans over 90 datasets gathered by several satellites.

JAXA published a guide to the code, and urged users to test it.

Samsung surfs memory market to profit, teases plan to end shoulder surfing

Samsung last week confirmed the massive profit spike it predicted in early January.

The Chaebol last week announced Q4 2025 revenue of ₩93.8 trillion ($65.5 billion) and profit of ₩20.1 trillion ($14 billion). For the same quarter in 2024, Samsung posted just ₩6.5 trillion ($4.5 billion) profit. The company attributed the strong result to “expanded sales of HBM and other high-value-added products, as well as the overall market price surge.”

Also last week, the company teased the launch of “a new layer of privacy for phone users to protect against shoulder surfing, making checking sensitive information in a crowded public space as secure as possible.”

We’re told the feature is “coming to Galaxy very soon.” Samsung usually launches next-gen premium handsets in February, so The Register fancies this is an early part of Samsung’s launch plan for this year’s Galaxy S models.

Grab embraces Cursor

Singapore-based super-app company Grab, which beat Uber at its own rideshare and food delivery game across much of Southeast Asia, has revealed it’s a massive user of agentic coding tool Cursor.

“We introduced Cursor in late 2024 as one of several tools in our AI engineering toolkit,” states a January 29 post. “Adoption grew quickly: 98 percent of Tech Grabbers became monthly active users, and about 75 percent use it weekly.”

“Notably, Cursor’s appeal extended beyond engineering, with non-technical teams incorporating it into their workflows.”

That may be because Cursor requires less effort to produce useful results.

“A standout metric is Cursor’s suggestion acceptance rate, which is around 50 percent, surpassing the industry average of 30 percent,” Grab’s post states. “This indicates two key insights: first, the suggestions are sufficiently relevant for engineers to accept them half of the time; second, engineers maintain a critical review process rather than accepting suggestions indiscriminately. We attribute this relevance to continuous feedback loops and environment-specific tuning, ensuring suggestions remain aligned with Grab’s codebase and conventions.” ®