The Osiris Group

EM Digital Infrastructure - Osiris Asia Impact Fund / FDII Fund / BRAC Osiris Impact Fund / Bangladesh IDC #tech #youth #pe #impact #growth

[The Osiris Group @OsirisGroup]

Trump 2.0 meets Bangladesh 2.0: The data centre imperative https://t.co/OeLQnGFtwm

[Mia Bao @mialalala2]

Just watched @kaifulee 's interview on the US-China AI landscape. A few takeaways felt especially useful✌️:

1. The US is currently about 15 months ahead of China in frontier AI models.

2. Top US AI companies are like “geniuses trying to win the Nobel Prize,” while Chinese AI companies are more like “a group of smart kids forming a study group.” They still compete, but open source creates more shared learning.

3. China’s AI companies face a real monetization challenge in enterprise software. Many Chinese companies are less used to annual subscriptions or usage-based pricing, and still tend to think of software as project-based work.

4. For the same product, Western, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian companies may be willing to pay around 8x more than Chinese companies. That helps explain why many Chinese AI companies are expanding overseas.

5. China may produce many breakthrough AI consumer apps, because Chinese companies are especially strong at consumer apps, hardware, robotics, embodied AI, and AI-first devices.

6. The US may continue to lead in frontier models, while China may move faster in turning AI into products people actually use.

7. His advice for young people in the age of AI: you don’t necessarily need to become an engineer first. What matters more is accountability, taste, conviction, courage, and foresight.

More👇

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

🚨 SOUTH KOREA JUST PROPOSED TAXING UNREALIZED GAINS.

And this is one of the major reasons behind today's massive selloff in the Korean market, now being called BLACK TUESDAY in Korea.

At a forum hosted by South Korea's ruling Democratic Party, lawmakers called for comprehensive taxation that would treat unrealized gains on stocks and real estate as taxable income, even before the asset is ever sold.

The ruling party has pushed escalating wealth tax measures throughout 2026, including a February forum proposing to lower the real estate capital gains exemption threshold from 1.2 billion won to 800 million won, and an April push to abolish the long term holding tax deduction entirely.

Today is the first time this campaign has explicitly extended to taxing unrealized stock gains.

Under current law, investors are taxed only when they sell a stock and realize a profit.

Under this proposal, investors could owe tax on paper gains they have not sold or collected, simply for holding a stock that went up in value.

The Netherlands tried almost this exact policy four months ago.

On February 12, 2026, Dutch lawmakers passed a law taxing unrealized gains on stocks, bonds, and crypto at a flat 36% every year, whether or not anything was sold.

The backlash was immediate. A petition against it gathered more than 61,000 signatures, and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke called it "the dumbest thing any government on planet earth is pursuing right now."

Just 13 days after the bill passed, the Dutch finance minister announced the government would scrap the unrealized gains portion entirely, admitting the law "cannot pass as is."

This lands directly on a South Korean market that just ran up nearly 95% over the past year, built largely on heavy retail buying with borrowed money.

A tax on gains that exist only on paper is a direct threat to the exact rally that created that exposure in the first place.

[Bloomberg @business]

Beijing has eliminated over 12,000 university degree programs, dismissing many as relics of a bygone era. https://t.co/tsMh9qw69o

[Excess Returns @excessreturnpod]

“That was what I call the biggest scream from the stomach of the market in history.”

Jeremy Grantham on the beneath-the-surface signal that has appeared at some of the biggest market tops in history.

[Desmond Shum @DesmondShum]

China is not only pricing technology. It is pricing political freshness.

I recently came across the terms “old tech” and “new tech” in Chinese investment circles. I found that interesting and looked into it.

“Old tech” refers to the internet giants of the last cycle: Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD, Baidu, NetEase, Xiaomi and their peers. These companies make up bulk of investable indexes. They have users, cash flow, engineers, cloud infrastructure, payment systems, data and distribution. In most markets, that would make them strategic assets.

But in China, they also carry political baggage. They are associated with platform monopolies, regulatory crackdowns, gaming restrictions, weak consumption, brutal e-commerce competition, and Xi’s campaign against private platform power. They dominate market capitalization, but no longer dominate the national imagination.

“New tech” refers to sectors now favoured by Beijing: AI, large language models, semiconductors, robotics, advanced manufacturing, domestic chips, embodied intelligence and other technologies tied to “new productive forces.” Many of these companies are smaller, less proven, and barely commercial. Yet they command extraordinary valuations because investors are pricing scarcity, policy support, import substitution and national-security relevance.

The valuation gap shows the point. Tencent and Alibaba remain huge — roughly HK$4 trillion(USD 600B) and HK$2 trillion in market value — but trade like mature businesses, generally around 10–20x earnings and low-single-digit sales multiples. By contrast, Cambricon, a chip designer, has traded around RMB1 trillion, at more than 100x sales and over 300x earnings. MiniMax, an AI company, was valued at roughly 80x sales at IPO and now trades at more than 600x sales. Zhipu, another AI company, reportedly moved from roughly 66x sales at IPO to over 1,000x sales.
For reference, OpenAI is valued at roughly 36x run-rate sales. Anthropic is valued at roughly 20x run-rate sales.

This is not a normal growth premium. It is scarcity, policy blessing, import substitution and national-champion imagination being capitalized into market value.

That is the real dichotomy in China today: not old versus new, but commercially proven versus politically favoured.

China is not the capital market most outsiders think they are investing in. It operates by a different set of rules. Many international investors understand the numbers, but only half-understand the game.

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

I recently spent a month in Asia, including 10 days in China, where I met with senior policy makers in several countries, and I found that over the past few months, there has been a big shift in the world order. I share my perspective in my latest article. 

As always, I welcome your questions and thoughts.

[spect @spectnfa]

Co-Founder of a16z (the biggest VC fund in the world) Marc Andreessen:

"People who want to build their careers should be spending every spare hour talking to AI: alright, train me up"

He says this is the habit that separates who gets paid and who gets replaced

In 1 hour 44 minutes, he explains why the people winning right now are training themselves on AI every spare hour

Open the model Ask it to teach you Practice Ask again Repeat daily

That is the new career ladder

Bookmark and watch the interview

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

Anthropic engineers just showed how they build a full app from scratch, using a loop of agents

40 minutes from the team behind Claude Code

they used three agents: one to plan, one to build, one to judge, cycling until the app actually works

the winners won't have the smartest model, they'll have the best loop

watch it, then read the full guide on how to actually use loops below

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: The US Economic Surprise Index is up to 63.2 points, the highest since August 2023.

This index measures economic data relative to consensus estimates, turning positive when data beats estimates and negative when data misses.

This metric has risen +57.6 points since late April, posting the largest 7-week increase since Q1 2022.

The move comes amid stronger-than-expected jobs data, ISM Services PMI, factory orders, ADP employment, job openings, and ISM Manufacturing PMI.

The US Economic Surprise Index is now approaching the 79.6 peak recorded in July 2023, which would mark the highest level since the early 2021 pandemic recovery.

US economic data is crushing expectations.

[Movez @0xMovez]

Andrew Ng:

"100% of my tasks are now done by AI agents - hype has exceeded my expectations. Loops is next step.

in 3-6 months, everyone will be using self-improving loops. No more prompting."

In a 30-minute talk, Andrew Ng explains how to build self-improving agentic systems from scratch.

Worth more than a $500 agentic course.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

The most valuable skill sets on the planet right now:

1. people who can set up agents properly, manage them, and run local AI models
2. marketers who know how to build distribution
3. robotics engineers who can do all three: build the hardware, wire in the AI, and source manufacturing etc
4. curators who are good at yapping and can do short form video in their sleep
5. the builder-distributor. The one person who can both ship the product AND get it in front of people
6. IRL community builders

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I know very little about basketball but I do know a bit about public speaking and I can say without any hyperbole that @ZohranKMamdani is one of the greatest public speakers alive on planet earth right now.

Chills.

[Desmond Shum @DesmondShum]

The Great Rotation Beijing Wants

Goldman’s latest long-run China report points to an important shift in the household balance sheet: the slow decline of property as the core store of Chinese household wealth, and the gradual rise of financial assets.

That view seems broadly plausible.

China’s household portfolio is still overwhelmingly tied to real estate. Goldman estimates that property accounts for more than half of household assets today, but could fall by roughly 10 percentage points over the next decade. The offset would come from a larger allocation to equities, insurance products, and other financial assets.

This is not merely a market story. It is also a political-economy story.

Beijing has recently tightened the regulatory framework around outbound investment. The practical effect is to make it harder for Chinese savings to leave the domestic system. For a dictatorial state, this serves several purposes.

First, it gives the government greater control over household savings. Capital that cannot easily leave becomes capital the state can observe, regulate, tax, guide, and, when necessary, mobilize.

Second, it allows Beijing to redirect household money toward the financial assets it wants to support. In the old model, household savings flowed into apartments. In the new model, they may be pushed into financial assets aligned with state priorities.

We are already seeing early signs of this shift. Over the past two months, household deposits have fallen while non-bank financial assets have risen. That does not yet prove a durable regime change, but it is consistent with Goldman’s argument: once property no longer offers the old one-way bet and bank saving rates are at historic lows, capital must find another domestic outlet.

There are two market implications worth watching.

The first is Hong Kong. If China’s domestic financial market continues to rise because excess household savings are trapped inside the mainland system, what does that mean for Hong Kong? Historically, Hong Kong benefited from being the offshore escape valve for Chinese capital. That flow helped arbitrage the price differential between mainland and Hong Kong markets. If Beijing now blocks or narrows that escape valve, how will that differential behave going forward?

The second is capital allocation. Xi will not allow this surge of domestic capital to flow neutrally. He will direct it toward his preferred “strategic sectors”: semiconductors, AI, advanced manufacturing, robotics, defense-adjacent industries, and other areas tied to industrial policy.

That money will create real capacity. Much of it will almost certainly create waste. China already has an overcapacity problem. Locking household savings inside the system and then pushing them into state-favored sectors likely will make that problem worse.

This is the central tension. China may indeed be moving from a property-driven household balance sheet to a financial-asset-driven one. But in China, financial deepening does not mean market liberalization. It means household savings being pulled from one state-favored machine — real estate — and redirected into another: the industrial-policy machine.

The old model inflated apartments.

The new model will inflate industrial capacity.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

The G7 AI lunch showed that frontier AI leaders have become part of the room where geopolitical choices are made.

The meeting put Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Arthur Mensch, Aidan Gomez, Uljan Sharka, Victor Riparbelli, Robin Rombach, Alex Wang, Marc Benioff, and leaders from Sarvam and Sakana into the same room as national leaders.

Sam Altman, who sat between President Donald Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was the first CEO to speak at the hours-long lunch.

The power shift is clear: governments can pass laws, but only a few private labs can build the models, test their dangerous abilities, restrict access, or provide the infrastructure needed to run them.

In G7, the immediate fight is over frontier AI access, because Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 triggered U.S. export controls after officials worried advanced models could help find software weaknesses at scale.

----

From "Forbes" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Ship traffic officially resumes in the Strait of Hormuz after US and Iran sign deal to end war.

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

This is WILD!

Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicted the internet, smartphones, and AI says aging ends by 2032 (Save this)

Kurzweil, now 78 years old, told a live audience that humanity will reach longevity escape velocity by 2032 and he explained exactly what that means with mathematical precision.

Right now, for every year you live, you get back approximately five months of life expectancy from medical and scientific progress meaning you are losing roughly seven months of net life per calendar year.

Longevity escape velocity is the threshold where that ratio flips, for every year you live, you get back a full year or more from scientific progress, meaning your biological clock starts running backward.

Kurzweil's prediction is that threshold hits by 2032 and beyond that point, you do not simply stop dying of aging, you actively get younger every year.

The mechanism is AI-driven drug discovery at a scale that was physically impossible five years ago.

By 2030, Kurzweil argues, AI will be able to take a biological problem, generate millions of potential drug candidates, screen all of them, and run trials on simulated digital populations compressing decades of clinical research into weeks.

This is already happening.

David Sinclair's lab at Harvard used AI to virtually screen 8 billion molecules against aging targets and is now preparing human trials moving from $400,000 gene therapies toward a $100 pill that can reset biological age by 50 to 95% in four weeks.

Sinclair has already demonstrated the ability to reverse aging in mammals restoring sight in mice with optic nerve damage and reversing Alzheimer's symptoms in lab models.

Kurzweil's track record is what makes the 2032 claim impossible to dismiss.

He predicted the internet's global dominance in 1990, the defeat of a world chess champion by a computer in 1998, pocket-sized devices as primary communications tools in 1999, and AI passing professional exams in the mid-2020s, all before anyone else was saying it publicly.

If you are under 60 and in reasonable health, his message is stay alive, stay healthy, and get to 2032.

The tools on the other side of that date will be unlike anything medicine has ever produced.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

For the record.

Today we get, Warsh is hawkish because of the Dot Plots narrative. LOL

The 5‑year, 5‑year inflation breakeven used to be the market’s north star for inflation, before the Fed turned policy into a theater of dots and speeches.

In doing so, it implicitly acknowledged the long and variable lags in monetary policy, often stretching up to two years, an inconvenient reality today’s policymakers and Fed‑obsessed Wall Street largely choose to ignore.

Now, with breakevens sitting below their 2.25% norm, a generation trained to trade Fed vibes over data is in for a brutal relearning of price discovery.

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

The new Fed Chair just went on record saying AI is the biggest economic shift of his lifetime and markets are completely missing what that means (Save this).

Kevin Warsh, the newly confirmed Fed Chair declared that artificial intelligence is "perhaps as important a change in the economy, business, and households as we've had in my adult lifetime."

Before being nominated, Warsh called the current moment the most productivity-enhancing wave of our lifetimes, past, present, and future and argued in a Wall Street Journal that AI would be a significant disinflationary force that bolsters American competitiveness for decades.

Warsh's core thesis is built on a direct parallel to the 1990s internet boom.

He argues that the internet took a decade to show up in official productivity data, but the Fed under Greenspan took the bet early allowing the economy to run hotter than conventional models suggested and the result was a historic expansion with low inflation and rising real wages.

Warsh wants to make that same bet on AI, and has said "the anecdotes will be there before the data. Policymakers will have to take a chance."

But his first meeting as Fed Chair tells the more complicated near-term story.

Today, Warsh held rates steady at 3.5 to 3.75%, the fourth consecutive hold and nearly half the committee signaled they want to hike rates before year end, with nine officials forecasting at least one increase.

The reason AI infrastructure spending is currently inflationary before it is disinflationary, the $4 trillion global data center buildout is consuming steel, electrical equipment, land and skilled labor faster than it is producing productivity gains.

Warsh notably did not submit a rate forecast dot at all, the only FOMC member not to, a deliberate signal that he refuses to box himself in.

He also made a sweeping structural change to how the Fed communicates.

Warsh stripped forward guidance from the policy statement entirely and has reduced the frequency of public Fed commentary, his philosophy being that markets should react to data, not to Fed predictions.

This is a fundamental shift from the Powell era, and it means volatility around economic data releases goes up substantially from here.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

2-year inflation breakevens are collapsing, they typically lead CPI and PCE lower. The disinflation impulse is already in motion. Folly to assume that a temporary supply shock leads to an inflationary spiral, yes ECB and BOJ hiked.

It’s worth recalling how many pundits on Wall St were calling for renewed rate hikes on the back of an exogenous supply shock, one that has now clearly proven temporary. The market saw through it, policy commentary did not.

Trump secured the deal he had promised, removing yet another source of uncertainty from the outlook.

As often attributed to Mark Twain: never argue with fools; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Hiking into a fading, exogenous supply shock, the ECB and BoJ risk enshrining yet another historic policy error. Instead of distinguishing relative‑price shocks from demand‑driven overheating, central bankers have reached reflexively for the same blunt Keynesian toolkit, tightening into a slowdown just as energy and supply bottlenecks unwind. In doing so, they are not just misreading the cycle; they are, yet again, fighting the last war rather than the one in front of them.