Nvidia's ability to sell high-performance AI chips in China has been sharply limited by US export licensing rules, which have restricted shipments of its H20 and H200 products. The controls have already forced Nvidia to take a US$4.5 billion inventory charge and have left the company uncertain about future revenue from China. Meanwhile, local competitors, some strengthened by recent IPOs, are expanding rapidly, potentially reshaping the global AI market

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that unsettled global markets with its low-cost models last year, has withheld early access to its upcoming V4 flagship from US chipmakers, breaking with long-standing industry practice, according to two sources familiar with the matter

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission is probing the MYR1.11 billion (US$250 million) agreement with UK-based Arm Holdings amid seizures, arrests, and political fallout. The government maintains the Cabinet-approved deal is still in force, and ministers have pledged cooperation with investigators

Scooters remain a vital mode of daily transport in Vietnam, and buoyed by policy support and demographic trends, the country is becoming a central battleground for the global electric scooter industry. Gogoro has intensified its expansion there, forming a joint venture with Castrol and planning pilots and product launches in 2026

Taiwan and South Korea have long defined the frontlines of global tech rivalry. Now, that relationship is evolving into something far more nuanced. Driven by the demands of the AI supercycle and mounting geopolitical pressures, the two are settling into an uneasy but necessary "frenemy" dynamic. DIGITIMES president Colley Hwang laid out this shift in a lecture on February 24, 2026, mapping the hidden vulnerabilities and emerging interdependencies that will shape both nations' tech futures. His analysis, centered on TSMC and Samsung, is clear: the era of pure head-to-head competition is over. Collaboration is now a strategic imperative

Nvidia said uncertainty over China shipments and tight product supply remain key constraints, even as generative AI drives record capital spending by hyperscalers and sovereign customers accelerate national AI infrastructure investments

As the AI era accelerates, South Korea's competitive position is weakening relative to China. Even semiconductors, long a pillar of the Korean economy, are now assessed as being in a state of co-opetition rather than clear leadership

SK Hynix, one of the world's top three memory chip makers, told investors on a recent Goldman Sachs conference call that the global memory market has fully shifted to a "seller's market," with prices expected to climb throughout 2026

After the US Supreme Court ruled that tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were unconstitutional, President Donald Trump reacted sharply, invoking Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose a 15% tariff on global imports. The move has once again cast a shadow of uncertainty over US trade policy

China IC design firm Rockchip is facing an open-source licensing dispute after GitHub reportedly froze code repositories linked to its projects, drawing attention across the semiconductor and software industries to open-source compliance risks

As the global manufacturing and robotics industry shifts towards humanoid robots, China's world-leading Big 5 humanoid robot companies will gather in Korea for the first time this March. Asia's leading manufacturing AX expo, Smart Factory & Automation World (AW) 2026, announced on February 12 that key companies spearheading the global humanoid robot industry have confirmed their participation

China is preparing a fivefold increase in domestic advanced logic chip output within one to two years to support its expanding AI computing infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Nikkei Asia

Anthropic has released a report accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax of systematically extracting capabilities from its Claude large language model through large-scale distillation. The goal: to accelerate training of their own systems

Kaynes Semicon, the semiconductor assembly and test arm of Kaynes Technology India Ltd., has adopted engineering simulation software from Synopsys to strengthen its outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) operations, as part of a broader strategy to expand into advanced chip packaging