Author: Aurora Insights
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The Real August Story: the Dominoes are falling soon
Hormuz stalled while oil reserves at a historic low, Washington rescued the yen, and ASEAN squeezed between the US and China. Aurora’s CEO unpacks August’s cascading geopolitical risks, and what comes next.
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Resource Nationalism: A Driving Force Reshaping Southeast Asia
Indonesia’s plan to channel key commodity exports through the state entity PT Danantara Sumberdaya Indonesia reflects a broader regional trend of increased government control in Southeast Asia. Businesses must now treat this shift as a structural priority and adapt to evolving policies across the region.
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Taiwan Talks: ASEAN Caught between Washington and Beijing
In conjunction with the 59th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting held in Manila from 21-24 July 2026, our Founder & CEO Ivy Kwek sat down with Taiwan Talks‘ host Wen-Ti Sung and Chiew Ping Hoo of East Asia International Relations (EAIR) Caucus to discuss the progress of the Code of Conduct on the South China Sea…
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Chinese Bodies, American Brains: The Next US-China Battleground
By Yen-Sin Khu, Analyst Physical Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next frontier of US-China technological competition. China is currently in the lead for the hardware race, but the building of the robot’s “bodies“ isn’t the only battleground. The real battleground includes the “brain;” the controlling software for the robots. Last month, Unitree, a Chinese startup…
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2026 at Midpoint: Turning Point, or Collision Course?
The first six months of 2026 have not been a slow build. They have been a rupture. The defining event of H1 2026 is the Iran war. The conflict that began on 28 February has triggered a chain of consequences with reverberating effects across the region and the globe. Three months on, there is no…
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The Trump-Xi Summit in Beijing: A Choreographed Détente
The most consequential bilateral meeting of the year has concluded. Just as we noted in our May newsletter, there were no major announcements, no substantive agreements, no structural breakthroughs. As the dust settles from President Trump’s 48-hour whirlwind Beijing tour that was wrapped in diplomatic pomp and pageantry, three of our Aurora Insights analysts break…
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Beyond the Deal: What China’s block of Meta’s Manus acquisition tells us about the new rules of AI
By Yen Sin Khu, Analyst Last month, China blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese-founded, Singapore-based AI startup. The timing is not incidental. At the peak of US-China AI competition, breakthrough technologies are no longer just commercial assets; they are instruments of national strategy. There is no longer a purely commercial decision for…
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Geopolitical Convergences: What April revealed and what May will decide
April 2026 was not a month of isolated crises. Three separate fault lines – energy security, AI governance, and steepening US-China competition – are converging simultaneously. Together, they mark a structural shift that no company in Southeast Asia can afford to treat as background noise. When Hormuz Becomes Malacca We are now entering the third…
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Q1 2026: The Quarter That Rewrote the Risk Map
Q1 2026 did not ease in gently. The first three months of the year delivered a sequence of shocks that would have been considered unthinkable in any previous year, but increasingly looks like the new normal. On 3 January, US forces arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro following airstrikes on military sites in Caracas, upending the…
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Aurora Insights featured in the South China Morning Post
📣 Aurora Insights in the News 📣 The South China Morning Post spoke to our operations director Carlos Pacheco on what the disrupted energy markets resulting from the Iran conflict means for ASEAN’s long-stalled power grid ambitions. His quotes: “The Iran conflict is the tipping point, where the conversation has been transformed from operational energy…