I-Chiun Precision Industry and Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have established Huizhi Advanced, the country's first startup focused on AI chip thermal design, targeting a global liquid-cooling market expected to reach US$19.2 billion by 2030.

The G20 Innovation Ministerial was held in North Carolina, US, from September 1 to 2, with artificial intelligence (AI) taking center stage. The US urged governments to pursue a light-touch regulatory approach, while officials and technology executives also addressed data centers and copyright rules governing AI training data. The following are the key takeaways from the meeting.

AI and high-performance computing (HPC) demand is changing the semiconductor industry's technology and investment priorities. As chip power consumption, computing density, and data transfer requirements rise rapidly, competition is no longer limited to front-end process scaling; 3D stacking, advanced packaging, high-density interconnects, thermal management, and memory technologies are also becoming more important.

Quantum computing has a trust problem. When a quantum machine produces an answer no ordinary computer can feasibly produce, there is no obvious way to tell whether the answer is right.

System integration remains a key hurdle as the AI chip industry pushes for higher power efficiency and faster transmission speeds, drawing intense attention to when short-reach optical communications between racks and chips will enter practical use. Industry players say the maturity of system integration is still the main consideration for commercialization.

Excitement is growing among investors and the public over the rising capabilities of humanoid robots. Yet as robot makers seek to turn their lab-built innovations into real-world commercial tools, one key bottleneck has emerged: safety.

Silicon photonics (SiPh) is emerging as a core theme at SEMICON Taiwan 2026, and while the sector is still in an early, fast-growing stage, production-line investments are already under way. As optical makers move into co-packaged optics (CPO), the source and capability of laser equipment are becoming critical to whether they can secure market share.

As AI model training, inference, and AI agent workloads continue to grow, AI accelerators are increasingly being optimized for different tasks. Amin Vahdat, Google's senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 that if a specific workload reaches sufficient scale and investment in custom chips is economically viable, Google could develop additional dedicated chips for different computing needs.

Taiwanese IC design startup Jmem Tek showcased its in-house physical unclonable function (PUF) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) hardware security technologies at SEMICON Taiwan 2026, as it pushes to build a hardware root of trust at the chip level for next-generation AI and smart devices facing quantum-era cybersecurity threats.

AI is forcing companies to rethink not only how software is built but how quickly ageing systems must be replaced, with Cisco warning that increasingly capable frontier models are turning technical debt into a board-level cybersecurity concern.

Trustworthy supply chain concerns are extending beyond semiconductors to drones and other autonomous systems, now emerging as national strategic industries. At a Semicon Taiwan 2026 side forum, defense and industry experts from Taiwan and the US called for stronger production capacity, standardized interfaces, testing infrastructure and predictable government procurement to turn Taiwan's supply chain strengths into a globally trusted base for unmanned systems.