UBS, in partnership with Ant International, launched a pilot program for tokenized bank deposits in Singapore.

UBS and Ant International officially signed a memorandum of understanding on November 16 and launched a large-scale pilot program for "tokenized bank deposits" in Singapore. The aim is to solve the most troublesome delay problem in cross-border financial transfers and allow companies to remit cross-border funds without being restricted by settlement time, multi-currency settlement and different business hours in different countries.

UBS partners with Ant International to launch Singapore tokenization pilot.

This collaboration takes place in Singapore, a global hub for institutional-grade blockchain testing, to jointly promote the application of "tokenized bank deposits" in cross-border payments and global liquidity management.

UBS plans to expand the use of its digital currency platform, "UBS Digital Cash," through this collaboration, while Ant International hopes to integrate the technology into Alipay+'s cross-border financial operations, making the transfer of accounts between branches in different countries more efficient.

Tokenization collaboration focuses on three main objectives to improve the efficiency of cross-border financial transactions.

UBS's collaboration with Ant International focuses on three objectives:

1. Create instant cross-border payments.
2. Simultaneous management of multi-currency liquidity.
3. Digitalized bank deposits replace traditional cross-border transfer processes.

This collaboration is considered one of the most concrete, widely implemented, and largest-scale cross-border "tokenized deposit" corporate cases to date, and is expected to improve the processing speed of cross-border cash flows from "several days" to "several minutes".

Restricted cross-border scheduling and delays in foreign exchange settlement have become the biggest pain points.

Both parties stated that they observed that when subsidiaries in different countries within the group need to remit funds to each other, they are often limited by the operating hours and foreign exchange settlement times of traditional banking systems, and even the settlement speed of different currencies. Such cross-border cash flow transfers within a company may seem simple, but because they involve the financial systems of different countries, they can take several days to process.

Therefore, UBS and Ant International hope to improve this pain point through "tokenized deposits," placing bank deposits on an authorized digital ledger so that funds can be synchronously transferred between different countries within the group within minutes, avoiding delays caused by traditional processes.

With bank issuance at its core, UBS Digital Cash 2024 has completed its pilot program.

UBS Digital Cash underwent initial pilot testing with some institutional clients in 2024, positioning itself as a digital currency issued by banks and used by institutions. This collaboration with Ant International represents the platform's most concrete and largest-scale cross-border application case.

For Ant International, if it is officially implemented in the future, it will enable corporate financial processes in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and other regions to change from traditional "manual reconciliation" to "programmable settlement" that can be set and automatically processed by the system, reducing delays in internal accounting and cross-border fund management.

(DBS and Ant Group launch a Treasury Tokens pilot program to improve the financial and liquidity management of multinational corporations)

GMI Cloud, a US-based data center startup, announced a $500 million investment in a large-scale AI data center in Taoyuan, Taiwan. The center will have a total capacity of 1 GW and will be equipped with 7,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs. The facility is scheduled to be operational by April 2026 and will have a processing capacity of nearly 2 million tokens per second. The company also revealed that it is currently seeking $400 million in loans from several Taiwanese banks and is collaborating with Reflection AI to help build a local AI platform in Taiwan.

What kind of company is GMI Cloud?

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in California, USA, GMI Cloud was originally a Bitcoin computing node service provider. In 2023, it transformed into a company focused on AI cloud infrastructure, specializing in "GPU-as-a-Service" and providing one-stop solutions such as GPU computing power leasing, cluster engines, and inference engines.

GMI Cloud emphasizes that customers have complete control over their cloud environment, free from platform lock-in. In partnership with NVIDIA, it has established data centers in the US, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Japan, creating a highly stable, low-latency GPU computing platform to support AI model training and inference needs. Over 60% of GMI Cloud's technical team are engineers, dedicated to building what it calls an "AI highway" system architecture. Funding was led by Headline Asia, with strategic investments from Banpu and Wistron. The company completed an $82 million Series A funding round in 2024.

GMI Cloud invests $500 million to enter the Taiwanese market, building a 1GW AI factory in Taoyuan.

GMI Cloud announced a $500 million investment in Taiwan to build a data center in Taoyuan, positioned as an "AI factory." The facility, with a capacity of approximately 1 GW, is designed to primarily provide cloud computing capabilities for AI model training and inference.

The company stated that the demand for AI in the Asian market is rising rapidly, and both enterprises adopting AI and governments planning local computing power platforms are driving them to choose to set up large AI supply bases in Taiwan.

Importing 7,000 Blackwell Ultra chips, expected to launch in April 2026.

CEO Alex Yeh explained that the AI ​​factory in Taoyuan will deploy up to 7,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, with an overall inference capability of nearly 2 million tokens per second. The official plan is for the facility to be fully operational around April 2026, serving businesses, developers, and organizations with large-scale model requirements.

Meanwhile, GMI Cloud is raising $400 million in loans from several Taiwanese banks and plans to raise another $200 million by the end of the year to support its overall construction and expansion needs.

Partnering with Reflection AI to help build a localized AI platform in Taiwan.

GMI Cloud stated that it has partnered with Reflection AI to jointly help build a local AI platform in Taiwan. The company mentioned that Taiwan is home to world-class manufacturers such as TSMC and Foxconn, making it an important location for deploying local computing power.

The CEO also revealed that customers have already started queuing up to reserve rooms at the Taoyuan base, but the list has not been made public. Currently, GMI Cloud's investors include Headline Asia and Wistron, a major server assembly partner of NVIDIA. In addition to the US and Taiwan, the company also operates in Japan, Singapore, and Thailand.