Asia Tech Glossary: AI, Gaming, E-commerce, Payments Terms

This glossary defines the terms Digital in Asia uses regularly across our trackers, country overviews, and industry analysis. Each entry is short by design — for the deeper picture, the linked articles cover the full context.

Last updated: May 2026. Total: 86 terms.

Aadhaar: India's biometric digital identity system covering 1.4 billion people. The foundation layer of "India Stack" digital public infrastructure — sits beneath UPI payments, DigiLocker, and most government and financial digital services.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): A hypothetical AI system matching or exceeding human cognitive ability across all tasks. Distinct from today's "narrow AI" — most current LLMs are not AGI, despite marketing claims.
Alibaba Cloud: Asia's largest cloud computing provider and the largest in China. Sits behind the Qwen open-weight LLM family. Together with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud forms the four-horse cloud race in Asia.
Anthropic: San Francisco-based AI safety company, builder of Claude. Notable in Asia for its emphasis on Constitutional AI and its absence (as of early 2026) from mainland China — a recurring item in our "LLM access in Asia" tracker. → LLM Access in Asia: Where ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the Chinese Models Stand in 15 Markets
API (Application Programming Interface): A defined interface that lets two software systems exchange data programmatically. Asia's super-app stacks rely on dense API ecosystems — Grab, Sea, and Tencent each expose hundreds of internal and external APIs.
ARPU (Average Revenue Per User): A core operator metric: total revenue divided by active users in a given period. Asian gaming and super-app companies obsess over ARPU because Asia has more users at lower spend than Western markets — Vietnam mobile gaming ARPU is roughly 1/12th China's.
BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later): Short-term credit at the point of purchase, typically interest-free if repaid within 30-90 days. The fastest-growing payment category in Southeast Asian e-commerce — 42% of SEA shoppers used BNPL in 2024 (Bain/Google/Temasek e-Conomy SEA). → Digital Payments in SEA Ecommerce: BNPL, QR Codes and the Death of Cash-on-Delivery
ByteDance: Chinese tech giant behind Douyin (China), TikTok (rest of world), CapCut, Lark, and Toutiao. The world's most-valuable private tech company. Its Ocean Engine ad platform powers most of China's digital advertising market. → How Douyin Advertising Actually Works: A Guide for Non-Chinese Speakers
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): Total cost to acquire one paying customer. In SEA gaming and ecommerce, CAC has compressed dramatically as TikTok Shop and live commerce reshape demand generation — sometimes 60-80% lower than traditional Facebook/Google paid acquisition.
CAICT: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology — a state-backed think tank that publishes most of the canonical statistics on China's AI and digital economy. Government-affiliated, so its data is treated as quasi-official.
Closed-loop commerce: When demand generation, conversion, and fulfilment all happen inside a single platform — e.g. seeing an ad on Douyin, buying inside Douyin, with payment via Douyin Pay. The defining structural difference between Asian and Western digital advertising.
Coupang: South Korea's dominant e-commerce platform, listed on the NYSE (CPNG). Built around same-day delivery via its proprietary "Rocket" logistics network. Korea's answer to Amazon.
CPI (Cost Per Install): Mobile advertising metric: amount paid for one verified app install. Asia CPI ranges roughly $0.30 (India, Indonesia) to $4-7 (Japan, Korea), reflecting market value-per-user differences.
DAU (Daily Active Users): Users who interact with a product on a given day. Asia's super-apps measure success in DAU more than monthly metrics — WeChat's ~1.3 billion DAU is the global benchmark.
Decree 147 (Decree 147/2024/ND-CP): Vietnam's 2024 regulation requiring foreign gaming companies to establish a local entity, comply with real-name verification, and operate under Vietnamese legal jurisdiction to serve users. Came into effect December 25, 2024. → Decree 147: Vietnam’s Domestic Gaming Realignment
DeepSeek: A Chinese AI lab whose January 2025 release of DeepSeek-R1 achieved performance comparable to OpenAI's o1 on math and coding benchmarks at a reported $6M training cost — triggering a 17% Nvidia share-price drop and a global repricing of AI infrastructure economics. → How DeepSeek Disrupted Global AI Economics From China
DePIN (Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Network): Token-incentivised crowdsourced infrastructure (compute, storage, wireless, sensors). A growing strand of Asia's crypto ecosystem, with significant deployment in Vietnam and the Philippines.
Digital Yuan (e-CNY): China's central bank digital currency (CBDC), issued by the People's Bank of China. Designed to coexist with WeChat Pay and Alipay rather than replace them. ~$250B in transaction volume by end-2024.
Douyin: ByteDance's short-video app for the China market — sister product to TikTok but running on a separate stack with deeper commerce integration. Generated $39.2B in ad revenue in 2024. → How Douyin Advertising Actually Works: A Guide for Non-Chinese Speakers
DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure): Open, interoperable digital systems run as public goods. India's "India Stack" (Aadhaar identity + UPI payments + DigiLocker documents) is the canonical DPI example and is being studied/copied across Asia and Africa.
e-Conomy SEA (e-Conomy SEA Report): Annual report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company sizing the Southeast Asian digital economy. The most-cited SEA tech market report; 2024 edition put SEA digital economy GMV at $263 billion.
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation): A profitability measure. SEA tech IPOs (Grab, Sea, Bukalapak) all moved from "growth at any cost" to EBITDA-positive guidance through 2023-2025 as private capital tightened.
ERNIE: Baidu's family of large language models, predating the LLM boom. ERNIE Bot was China's first major consumer-facing AI chatbot and remains one of the top-five most-used Chinese LLMs.
EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography): The semiconductor manufacturing technique used to make leading-edge chips (sub-7nm). Only ASML in the Netherlands makes EUV machines; export controls have prevented their sale to mainland China since 2019, the central choke point in the chip war. → The Asian AI Chip Race: China, TSMC, Samsung and Semiconductor Supply
Foundation model: A large model trained on broad data that can be adapted to many downstream tasks. GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen are all foundation models. Asia is now training competitive foundation models in every major economy.
Foundry: A semiconductor company that manufactures chips for other companies (which design but don't produce). TSMC is the dominant foundry; Samsung is second. Foundry capacity is the single most concentrated supply chain in the AI economy.
Free Fire (Garena Free Fire): A mobile battle-royale game published by Sea Group's Garena division. Free Fire was Southeast Asia's top-grossing mobile game for years and remains a pillar of Sea Group's gaming revenue (~$358M in 2025).
Gacha: Japanese-origin monetisation mechanic where players pay for randomised in-game items (named after capsule-toy vending machines). Genshin Impact, Honor of Kings, and most top Japanese mobile games rely on gacha for the bulk of revenue.
Garena: Sea Group's gaming division. Publishes Free Fire and a portfolio of licensed games across SEA, Latin America, India, and Africa. The Asian gaming "publisher with regional infrastructure" template that has been imitated repeatedly.
Genshin Impact: miHoYo's open-world gacha RPG, originally launched 2020. The most-grossing Chinese game export ever, with $5B+ global lifetime revenue. Helped legitimise gacha mechanics in Western markets.
GMV (Gross Merchandise Value): Total value of goods sold through a marketplace before fees, returns, or refunds. The headline KPI for ecommerce platforms — Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop are all measured in SEA GMV terms first, revenue second.
GoTo Group: Indonesia's super-app conglomerate formed by the 2021 merger of Gojek and Tokopedia. Listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. Competes with Grab and Sea for SEA super-app dominance.
Grab: Singapore-headquartered super-app spanning ride-hailing, food delivery, payments, and financial services across eight SEA countries. Listed on Nasdaq (GRAB). Reported its first full-year net profit in FY 2025 ($200M). → How Grab and Sea Group Are Building AI-Powered Super Apps
HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory): A stacked-memory standard critical for AI training and inference. SK Hynix and Samsung together control ~88% of the global HBM market, making South Korea a critical AI supply-chain node. → The Asian AI Chip Race: China, TSMC, Samsung and Semiconductor Supply
Honor of Kings: Tencent's flagship MOBA mobile game. The single highest-grossing mobile game in China and one of the largest in the world, with daily-active-user counts running into the hundreds of millions.
Hugging Face: The de facto open-source repository for AI models, datasets, and demos. Home to most open-weight Asian LLMs including Qwen, DeepSeek, SEA-LION, and Sahabat-AI.
Hybrid-casual: A games industry monetisation hybrid combining hyper-casual game mechanics (simple, viral) with mid-core retention systems (progression, in-app purchases, ads). The dominant new genre in Asian mobile gaming since 2023.
India Stack: India's digital public infrastructure layer-cake: Aadhaar identity, UPI payments, DigiLocker documents, OCEN credit rails, and ONDC commerce. Increasingly cited as the alternative model to Big Tech's closed platforms.
IndiaAI Mission: India's national AI strategy programme launched 2024, with $1.25B initial allocation for compute, sovereign LLMs (Sarvam, Krutrim), and the AIKosh dataset platform.
Inferencing: The runtime stage of an AI model — when a trained model produces an output for a user query. Distinct from training. Inferencing is where Asian markets, especially India, see their largest commercial opportunity. → India’s Race to Become the World’s AI Inferencing Capital
KOL (Key Opinion Leader): The Asian-Pacific term for influencer or content creator with audience-buying power. KOLs in China and SEA are typically tied directly into commerce platforms (Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Shopee Live) rather than independent ad-supported channels.
Krafton: South Korean game publisher behind PUBG and PUBG Mobile. Krafton's 2025 revenue was KRW 3.3 trillion (~$2.3B), and the company has expanded into India through deep local studio partnerships.
KYC (Know Your Customer): Identity-verification requirement for financial services. Asia's digital wallet boom rests on lightweight digital KYC — UPI in India, e-KYC under PromptPay in Thailand, NRIC-linked SingPass in Singapore.
Live commerce: Real-time video commerce, dominant in China (Douyin, Taobao Live) and growing in SEA (Shopee Live, TikTok Shop Live). Asia is the global leader: Chinese live commerce alone exceeded $750B in 2024 GMV. → The Creator Economy Asia: TikTok, YouTube, Douyin and Creator Monetization, The SEA Social Commerce Revolution: From Invisible to 25% of E-Commerce in Three Years
LLM (Large Language Model): Transformer-based AI model trained on text at scale. The defining technology of the 2023+ AI boom — see GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, ERNIE.
MAU (Monthly Active Users): Users who interact with a product in a given month. The standard size metric for consumer platforms. WeChat reports ~1.4B MAU; Shopee reports ~225M; TikTok Shop's SEA users now exceed 100M.
MCN (Multi-Channel Network): A talent management agency for KOLs/creators, originating in YouTube and now widespread across Douyin and Bilibili in China. Asian MCNs are vertically integrated into commerce, often operating their own livestream studios.
Meituan: China's dominant local-services super-app: food delivery, hotel booking, restaurant reviews, on-demand retail. Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Often described as "Yelp + DoorDash + OpenTable + Booking.com in one app".
miHoYo: Shanghai-based game studio behind Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, and Honkai Impact 3rd. The most successful Chinese game-export company, with HQs and studios across Asia, Europe, and North America.
MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena): A genre dominated by 5v5 strategic combat games — Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Mobile Legends. The single most popular competitive gaming genre in Asia.
MoMo: Vietnam's leading e-wallet, with ~68% market share. Acquired by VNG-affiliated investors. Pre-installed on most Vietnamese Android handsets and connected to over 50 banks.
Naver: South Korea's dominant search engine and tech conglomerate. Owns Webtoon (the global comics platform), Line Messenger (in partnership with SoftBank), and runs HyperCLOVA X — Korea's sovereign LLM.
NetEase: China's second-largest gaming publisher (after Tencent). Behind Naraka: Bladepoint, Once Human, and the Chinese versions of Blizzard's games. Listed on Nasdaq (NTES) and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India): The not-for-profit organisation that operates UPI and India's major retail payment systems (RuPay, IMPS, NACH). The institutional backbone of India's digital payments revolution.
OECD AI Policy Observatory: The most comprehensive global registry of national AI strategies. Tracks over 1,000 AI policies across 70+ countries and serves as a primary source for our policy tracker.
Open weights: AI models whose model weights are publicly downloadable (vs closed/API-only models). Most leading Chinese LLMs — Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM — are open-weight, a key reason for their global adoption.
Programmatic advertising: Automated, auction-based ad buying. Dominant in mature Asian markets (Japan, Korea, Australia) but slower to take in SEA where social and ecommerce-platform-native buying captures most ad budget.
PromptPay: Thailand's national real-time mobile payment system, launched 2017. Built on a national QR code standard and operated through participating banks. The Thai equivalent of UPI in volume terms.
Qwen: Alibaba's family of large language models. Qwen and its derivatives form the largest open-weight model ecosystem on Hugging Face (>100,000 models), making Alibaba the de facto leader in Chinese open-source AI. → How Chinese AI Models Are Expanding Across Southeast Asia
Rakuten: Japan's largest e-commerce platform and one of its largest tech conglomerates: marketplace, telecom (Rakuten Mobile), banking, payments, and a partnership with OpenAI for the Japanese market.
Real-name registration: A regulatory requirement in China and Vietnam (post-Decree 147) that users register accounts using verified real identities. The structural reason foreign tech companies struggle to operate at scale in either market.
Sea Group: Singapore-headquartered tech conglomerate listed on the NYSE (SE). Owns Shopee (ecommerce), Garena (gaming), and SeaMoney (fintech). Reported $22.4B FY2025 revenue — one of SEA's two largest tech companies (with Grab).
SEA-LION: Singapore's sovereign LLM family, developed by AI Singapore. Trained on Southeast Asian languages including Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, and Tagalog. The benchmark sovereign LLM for SEA-context tasks.
SeaMoney: Sea Group's fintech division. Operates ShopeePay, SeaBank (digital banking in Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines), and consumer credit products integrated into Shopee's commerce flow.
Shopee: Sea Group's ecommerce marketplace. SEA's largest e-commerce platform by GMV (~52% market share) and major presences in Brazil, Mexico, and Taiwan. The competitive benchmark for any new SEA marketplace.
Sky Mavis: Vietnamese game studio behind Axie Infinity, the play-to-earn NFT game that defined the 2021 crypto-gaming boom. Backed by VNG and continues to operate the Ronin blockchain.
SMIC: Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation — China's largest domestic foundry. Has produced 7nm chips despite EUV restrictions, but at significantly lower yields and higher costs than TSMC or Samsung.
Social commerce: Buying products inside social platforms (TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, Douyin, Xiaohongshu). Forecast to hit ~25% of total SEA ecommerce by 2027 — a structural shift from "social discovery to other-site purchase" toward in-platform conversion. → The SEA Social Commerce Revolution: From Invisible to 25% of E-Commerce in Three Years
Sovereign AI: The development of domestically owned and controlled AI infrastructure, models, and data. Every major APAC economy launched or funded a sovereign LLM programme in 2024-2026. → Sovereign AI in Asia: Why Every Country Is Building Its Own LLM
Sovereign LLM: A large language model developed under a national programme, often trained on local-language data and aligned to local regulatory regimes. Examples: SEA-LION (Singapore), Sahabat-AI (Indonesia), HyperCLOVA X (Korea), Sarvam (India).
Super app: A single mobile application that bundles many services (ride-hailing, food delivery, payments, ecommerce, financial services) behind one ID and one wallet. Asian invention; Western tech is still trying to catch up. → Super Apps in Asia: The Business Model Behind 3.5 Billion Users, How Grab and Sea Group Are Building AI-Powered Super Apps
Take rate: The percentage a marketplace charges sellers per transaction. SEA take rates jumped sharply in 2025-2026 as platforms shifted from growth-at-any-cost to profitability — Shopee added a 5% technical fee, TikTok Shop took 12.5% on Vietnam transactions. → Shopee vs Lazada vs TikTok Shop Seller Fees (2026): What Ecommerce Platforms Really Charge in Southeast Asia
Taobao: Alibaba's C2C ecommerce marketplace. Operates as a separate brand from Tmall (B2C). The platform that defined Chinese ecommerce social-commerce conventions like livestreaming and mini-vlog product reviews.
Tencent: China's largest tech conglomerate by revenue. Owns WeChat (1.4B users), QQ, Tencent Games (including Honor of Kings), Tencent Cloud, and major stakes in Sea Group, Riot Games, Epic Games, and Supercell.
Tier 1/2/3 cities: Chinese government classification of cities by population, GDP, and connectivity. Tier 1 = Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou/Shenzhen. Most Chinese tech expansion is now happening in Tier 2/3 markets where digital adoption is fastest-growing.
TikTok Shop: TikTok's in-app ecommerce marketplace. Grew from $4.4B GMV (2021) to $45.6B (2024) in Southeast Asia, becoming the region's second-largest ecommerce platform behind Shopee. → TikTok Shop SEA: From Shoppable Video to Regional Ecommerce Giant, Shopee vs TikTok Shop: The Platform Wars Reshaping Southeast Asia’s $159B Market
Tmall: Alibaba's premium B2C ecommerce platform, separate from Taobao. Hosts brand stores from Apple, Nike, L'Oreal, and most major foreign brands selling into China — the canonical "brand ecommerce in China" path.
Token (LLM): The unit of text an LLM processes — roughly 0.75 words in English, less in non-Latin scripts. AI provider pricing is denominated in tokens. China's daily AI token usage hit 140 trillion in March 2026.
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company): Taiwan's pure-play foundry — the world's largest. Manufactures 72% of leading-edge chips and the entirety of Apple's, Nvidia's, and AMD's most advanced silicon. The most strategically significant company in the AI supply chain. → The Asian AI Chip Race: China, TSMC, Samsung and Semiconductor Supply
UPI (Unified Payments Interface): India's real-time, free-to-consumer mobile payment rail, run by NPCI. Processes over 600 million transactions per day; the world's largest retail payment system by volume. Built as digital public infrastructure. → India’s Digital Payments Revolution Is Unlike Anything the World Has Seen Before, UPI Won the Payment War. Now It Has a Revenue Problem.
VinaResearch: Hanoi-based market research firm covering Vietnamese consumer and gaming markets. One of the few Vietnam-native data sources cited regularly in cross-border tech research alongside Niko Partners and Newzoo.
VNG: Vietnam's largest tech company. Owns Zalo (the dominant Vietnamese messenger), publishes most major foreign games in Vietnam, and holds a stake in Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity). Estimated 55% market share of Vietnam's gaming industry. → VNG: Vietnam Gaming and the Wider Integrated Digital Ecosystem
WeChat: Tencent's flagship app — China's only true super-app. Bundles messaging, payments (WeChat Pay), Mini Programs (light apps inside the app), Channels (short video), and Moments (social feed). 1.4 billion users.
Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book): China's lifestyle social-commerce platform — somewhere between Pinterest, Instagram, and Yelp. Increasingly the discovery layer for premium consumer brands entering China and the canonical platform for KOL marketing.
Zalo: Vietnam's dominant messaging app, owned by VNG. ~75 million monthly active users. The Vietnamese equivalent of WeChat in usage patterns — increasingly a commerce and payments surface, not just messaging.
Zhipu AI: Beijing-based Chinese AI lab behind the GLM family of models. One of the "Six Tigers" of Chinese AI alongside Moonshot, MiniMax, 01.AI, Baichuan, and StepFun. Distinguished by strong multilingual and code performance.

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