Asia In Brief India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades.<\/p>\n
The nation\u2019s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman yesterday announced the schemes in the nation\u2019s annual budget, which included a proposed tax holiday \u2013 extending until 2047 \u2013 for \u201cany foreign company who provides services to any part of the world outside India by procuring datacenter services in India.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitharaman said the measure recognizes \u201cthe need to enable critical infrastructure and boost investment in datacenters,\u201d and will be available if services are procured through an Indian reseller.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Two other measures in the budget are also notable.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s high-tech manufacturing sector.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Register finds this one fascinating given that many skilled Indian tech workers have left the country.<\/p>\n
NTT looks to Vietnam for offshore talent<\/p>\n
Japanese tech services giant NTT Data last week announced<\/a> the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Vietnamese software development house CMC Global, \u201cto strengthen offshore development capabilities for the Japanese market by leveraging Vietnam’s IT talent.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBy 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,\u201d the announcement of the tie-up states.<\/p>\n Vietnam is trying hard to grow its information technology industry, including manufacturing and services.<\/p>\n Japan opens Earth Data to AI<\/p>\n Japan\u2019s Aerospace Exploration Agency last week announced<\/a> the release of sample code for model context protocol (MCP) for Claude Desktop allowing access to the API it provides for Earth observation data.<\/p>\n The release means users can now access the data through a chatbot interface.<\/p>\n JAXA\u2019s data spans over 90 datasets gathered by several satellites.<\/p>\n JAXA published<\/a> a guide to the code, and urged users to test it.<\/p>\n Samsung surfs memory market to profit, teases plan to end shoulder surfing<\/p>\n Samsung last week confirmed the massive profit spike it predicted<\/a> in early January.<\/p>\n