Category: 3. Business

Only four bottles of Asahi Super Dry beer are left on the shelves of Ben Thai, a cosy restaurant in the Tokyo suburb of Sengawacho.

Its owner, Sakaolath Sugizaki, expects to get a few more soon, but she says her supplier is keeping the bulk of its stock for bigger customers.

That’s because Asahi, the maker of Japan’s best-selling beer, was forced to halt production at most of its 30 factories in the country at the end of last month after being hit by a cyber-attack.

While all of its facilities in Japan – including six breweries – have now partially reopened, its computer systems are still down.

That means it has to process orders and shipments manually – using pen, paper and fax machines – resulting in much fewer shipments than before the attack.

Asahi accounts for about 40% of Japan’s beer market, so its problems are having a major impact on bars, restaurants and retailers.

The company has apologised “for any difficulties caused by the recent attack” but has not yet said when it expects its operations to be fully up and running again.

The BBC visited convenience stores and supermarkets in Tokyo and Hokkaido – where workers said they were selling their current stock and hadn’t been able to place new orders for Asahi products, which also include water and food items.

Hisako Arisawa, who runs a liquor store in Tokyo, says she is worried about her customers as she can only get a few bottles of Super Dry at a time and expects the disruption to go on for at least a month.

The problem isn’t just affecting beer, she adds, there are also shortages of Asahi’s soft drinks, such as ginger beer and soda water.

Last week, some of the country’s biggest convenience store chains warned their customers to expect shortages.

FamilyMart said its Famimaru range of bottled teas, which are made by Asahi, were expected to be in short supply or out of stock.

7-Eleven halted shipments in Japan of Asahi products, while Lawsons also said it expected shortages.

Mr Nakano, who didn’t want to share his first name, works for an alcohol wholesaler.

While some shipments from Asahi have resumed, he says he is only getting about 10-20% of the normal amount.

His orders are now handwritten and taken by fax. Asahi notifies him by fax when lorries are ready to leave its factory.

Asahi also owns big brands in Europe – such as Peroni, Grolsch, and the British brewer Fuller’s – but the firm has said those operations have not been affected by the cyber-attack.

Ransomware group Qilin – which has previously hacked other major organisations – has claimed responsibility for the attack on Asahi.

It operates a platform that allows users to carry out cyber-attacks in exchange for a percentage of extortion proceeds.

Asahi has not confirmed the nature of the attack on its operations but has said data suspected to have been leaked in the hack had been found on the internet.

It is the latest in a series of cyber-attacks by other hacking groups that have hit major firms around the world, including carmaker Jaguar Land Rover and retail giant Marks and Spencer.

Travellers were delayed at a number of European airports in September after a ransomware attack disrupted check-in and boarding software.

Back in Japan, a cyber-attack paralysed operations at a container terminal in the city of Nagoya for three days in 2024.

Japan Airlines was also hacked last Christmas, causing delays and cancellations to domestic flights.

While Japan’s image around the world may be of a technologically advanced nation, some experts have warned it does not have enough cybersecurity professionals and has low rates of digital literacy when it comes to business software.

This issue was highlighted last year when officials finally stopped asking people to submit documents to the government using floppy disks, even though they fell out of fashion in much of the rest of the world in the 1990s.

Japan is vulnerable to cyber-attacks “given a reliance on legacy systems and a society with a high level of trust,” Cartan McLaughlin from Nihon Cyber Defence Group told the BBC.

Many organisations in the country are not prepared for attacks and are willing to pay ransoms, which makes them attractive to hackers, he added.

Speaking at a news conference this week, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said the Asahi cyber-attack was being investigated.

“We will continue to improve our cyber capabilities,” he added.

Earlier this year, the Japanese government passed a landmark law giving it more powers in the event of cyber-attacks.

Experts have praised the Active Cyber Defense Law (ACD), because it allows the government to share more information with companies, and also empowers the police and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to mount their own attacks to neutralise attackers’ servers.

But that is little consolation to small businesses like Ben Thai restaurant and its customers.

Owner Sakaolath says she’s not sure what will happen the next time she puts in an order for Super Dry, and nor do many others across Japan.

Additional reporting by Chie Kobayashi in Tokyo

At OpenAI’s DevDay this week, OpenAI boss Sam Altman did what American tech bosses rarely do these days: he actually answered questions from reporters.

“I know it’s tempting to write the bubble story,” Mr Altman told me as he sat flanked by his top lieutenants. “In fact, there are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now.”

In Silicon Valley, the debate over whether AI companies are overvalued has taken on a new urgency.

Sceptics are privately – and some now publicly – asking whether the rapid rise in the value of AI tech companies may be, at least in part, the result of what they call “financial engineering”.

In other words – there are fears these companies are overvalued.

Mr Altman said he expected investors would make some bad calls and silly start-ups would walk away with crazy money.

But with OpenAI, he told me, “there’s something real happening here”.

Not everyone is convinced.

In recent days, warnings of an AI bubble have come from the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, as well as JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon who told the BBC “the level of uncertainty should be higher in most people’s minds”.

And here, in what is often considered the tech capital of the world, concerns are growing.

At a panel discussion at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum this week, early AI entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan told a packed audience he has lived through four bubbles.

He’s especially concerned now given the magnitude of money on the table as compared to the dot-com boom. There’s so much more to lose.

“When [the bubble] breaks, it’s going to be really bad, and not just for people in AI,” he said.

“It’s going to drag down the rest of the economy.”

However, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which has minted its fair share of tech entrepreneurs, Prof Anat Admati says while there have been many attempts to model when we’re in the bubble, it can be a futile exercise.

“It is very hard to time a bubble,” Prof Admati told me. “And you can’t say with certainty you were in one until after the bubble has burst.”

But the data is concerning to many.

AI-related enterprises have accounted for 80% of the stunning gains in the American stock market this year – and Gartner estimates global spending on AI will likely reach a whopping $1.5tn (£1.1tn) before 2025 is out.

OpenAI, which brought AI into the consumer mainstream with ChatGPT in 2022, is at the centre of the tangled web of deals drawing scrutiny.

For example – last month, it entered into a $100bn deal with chipmaker Nvidia, which is itself the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

It expands an existing investment Nvidia already had in Mr Altman’s company – with expectations that OpenAI will build data centres powered with Nvidia’s advanced chips.

Then on Monday, OpenAI announced plans to purchase billions of dollars worth of equipment for developing AI from Nvidia rival AMD, in a deal that could make it one of AMD’s largest shareholders.

Remember this is a private company, albeit one recently valued at a half-trillion dollars.

Then there’s tech giant Microsoft, which is heavily invested, and cloud computing behemoth Oracle has a $300bn deal with OpenAI, too.

OpenAI’s Stargate project in Abilene, Texas, funded with the help of Oracle and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and announced at the White House during President Donald Trump’s first week in office, grows ever larger every few months.

And as for Nvidia, it has a stake in AI startup CoreWeave – which supplies OpenAI with some of its massive infrastructure needs.

And as these increasingly complex financing arrangements get more and more common, the experts here in Silicon Valley say they may be clouding perceptions on AI demand.

Some people aren’t mincing their words about it either, calling the deals “circular financing” or even “vendor financing” – where a company invests in or lends to its own customers so they can continue making purchases.

“Yes, the investment loans are unprecedented,” Mr Altman told me on Monday.

But, he added, “it’s also unprecedented for companies to be growing revenue this fast.”

OpenAI’s revenue is growing quickly, but it has never turned a profit.

And it is hardly a good sign that the people I’ve spoken to keep bringing up Nortel – the Canadian telecom equipment-maker that borrowed prolifically to help finance deals for their customers (and thereby artificially boost demand for their wares).

For his part, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang defended his deal with OpenAI on CNBC Monday, saying the firm isn’t required to buy his company’s tech with the money he invests.

“They can use it to do anything they like,” Huang said.

“There’s no exclusivities. Our primary goal is just really to support them and help them grow – and grow the ecosystem.”

Mr Kaplan says he sees a couple of telltale signs the AI sector – and therefore the wider economy – could be in trouble.

In frothy times, he says, companies announce major initiatives and product plans that they don’t yet have the capital for.

Meanwhile, retail investors clamour to get in on the start-up action.

The surge in AMD stock this week could indicate investors are trying to get a piece of the ChatGPT wealth machine – and while all this is playing out, real physical infrastructure aimed at satisfying the seemingly insatiable hunger for more AI development is being built.

“We’re creating a new man-made ecological disaster: enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment, with no one left to hold accountable because the builders and investors will be long gone,” Mr Kaplan said.

But even if we are in a bubble, the hope from Silicon Valley is investments being made now won’t necessary go to waste.

“The thing that comforts me is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday,” said Jeff Boudier, who builds products at the AI community hub Hugging Face.

“If there is overinvestment into infrastructure for AI workloads, there may be financial risks tied to it,” he said.

“But it’s going to enable lots of great new products and experiences including ones we’re not thinking about today.”

There are plenty of believers in AI’s potential to transform society.

The question is whether the money to fund the ambitions of the foremost companies in the sector may be drying up.

“Nvidia looks like the last lender or investor,” said Rihard Jarc, who founded the UncoverAlpha newsletter.

“Who else has the capacity right now to invest $100 billion in another company?”