| Africa
Amazon is launching physical stores in Johannesburg and Cape Town, as part of its Shop Mzansi initiative. The pop-up stores will showcase locally made products from South African entrepreneurs, allowing customers to engage directly with sellers. Amazon said this reinforces its commitment to supporting small businesses. The company launched in South Africa last May, and has since been trying to capture a larger share of the e-commerce market from industry leader Takealot.com. — Damilare Dosunmu from Nairobi China
DeepSeek published a paper in Nature, detailing the training techniques and costs behind its R1 model, which shook the world early in the year and briefly caused U.S. tech stocks to tank. The paper reveals that R1 was trained on 512 Nvidia H800 chips, at a computing cost of just $294,000, and addresses concerns by confirming no OpenAI data was deliberately used in training. The publication adds to DeepSeek's credibility, with Nature featuring it on its cover and describing R1 as the first major large language model to undergo rigorous external review. The journal also urged other tech companies to follow suit and submit their models for peer review. — Viola Zhou from New York Latin America
China is stepping up efforts to shrink the distance between Asia and Latin America, emphasizing the growing ties between the two regions amid a global trade reshuffle. Earlier this month, China launched its first direct shipping service from the city of Suzhou to Chancay, Peru. The Chancay megaport — a flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative, China's ambitious global infrastructure plan — was inaugurated last year following warnings from U.S. officials that it could be used by China for intelligence-gathering activities. It's not just goods: China Eastern Airlines is set to open its first direct route between Shanghai and Buenos Aires. — Karla Zabludovsky from Mexico City South Asia
India has become the number one country for Google's Nano Banana image-generation model. The tool, officially known as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, is making waves globally, but Indians have caught the attention of Google DeepMind executives by testing unique and localized prompts. Some examples include recreating retro looks inspired by 1990s Bollywood and generating images of themselves in a saree. Separately, Indians are using the Veo 3 AI video-generation model on the Gemini app to create short videos from old photos of their grandparents and great-grandparents. The Nano Banana tool makes it easier to spread disinformation, experts have warned. — Ananya Bhattacharya from Mumbai Southeast Asia
Apple is planning a trial run for its first foldable iPhone in Taiwan before starting mass production in India. The U.S. tech giant reportedly aims to refine the process on a pilot line in Taiwan, and then shift large-scale production to India, which has already surpassed China in shipping the most U.S.-bound iPhones this year. Yet analysts say it will be a long, arduous task to fully replace China, which still dominates in the core assembly and component production processes essential to making iPhones.— Mehboob Jeelani from New Delhi | 
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