Applied Materials announced that Kioxia will join its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center in Silicon Valley, California. The two companies will collaborate on developing advanced memory cells and structures, multi-chip stacking architectures, and new materials engineering technologies to improve the memory density and performance required in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Connector maker Nextronics Engineering said its humanoid robot-related products began shipping in 2026, while North American customers are preparing for mass production and have set a 2027 production target. The company expects those programs, alongside AI-related communications, to lift revenue sharply in 2027 and further shift its business mix toward higher-growth segments.

China Rare Earth Innovation Technology and Beijing-based Direct Drive Tech signed a strategic cooperation agreement on September 29 to jointly develop high-performance magnetic materials for direct-drive motors, including neodymium-iron-boron magnets, flux-concentrating rings, and radially oriented magnetic rings, linking upstream rare-earth resources with robot drive modules.

Google is preparing to send its in-house AI accelerator, the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), into low Earth orbit for the first time as it explores whether AI computing can eventually expand beyond terrestrial data centers and into space. CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced that Project Suncatcher will begin its first in-orbit test on October 1, with computing power roughly equivalent to that of a single ground-based server.

China's humanoid robot market continued to expand rapidly in the first half of 2026, with shipments exceeding 19,000 units and accounting for about 77.9% of the global total. Chinese suppliers, meanwhile, represented more than 95% of worldwide shipments, underscoring China's position as both the largest humanoid robot market and the industry's dominant source of supply.

AWS's latest Trainium 3 shipments appear to be running behind expectations, but the strain reflects broader pressures that global readers will recognize across the AI hardware supply chain. Suppliers cited parts shortages, assembly complexity, and rapid demand growthas the main bottlenecks, which could affect cloud costs, capacity, and competition worldwide.

Apple's entry into India's payments market gives its device users a new way to pay by card, but its initial reach will depend on bank and merchant integrations in a country where a domestic real-time system already dominates digital transactions. The service launched on September 30 for eligible Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cardholders, placing Apple's wallet alongside, rather than replacing, India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Jabil's fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 marked the point at which AI data-center hardware became the clear center of gravity for the US contract manufacturer. Revenue for the three months ended August 31 rose 29% from a year earlier to US$10.6 billion. The GAAP operating margin widened to 5.7% from 4.1% as new capacity came online faster than planned and more hyperscale customers moved into volume production.

Synopsys is betting that the surest way to keep generative AI from eroding its electronic design automation (EDA) franchise is to build the model together with the AI developer and share the proceeds. The chip design software maker said on September 30, 2026, that it has signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI to jointly develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized model optimized to operate Synopsys' EDA tools, under an arrangement that Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi told Reuters was structured so that "it will not be cannibalizing our business."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the Korea Society's annual dinner in New York on September 28 local time and received the 2026 Van Fleet Award, with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won on hand to congratulate him. The appearance underscored how Nvidia's ties with South Korea's semiconductor makers have expanded from memory supply into AI manufacturing, creating a two-way relationship in products and technology.