Taiwanese IC design house Sunplus Technology expects its automotive orders to strengthen further in the third quarter of 2026, but warned that rising memory and component costs could weigh on overall market demand and dampen customers' willingness to place orders.

The global semiconductor ecosystem is facing an unprecedented shortage of memory chips, with hardware growth increasingly constrained by memory availability. At the same time, capacity at the world's leading advanced chipmakers has been fully booked, turning packaging capacity and memory allocation into major challenges for the broader AI market.

Tsinghua Unigroup's former "chip-to-cloud" expansion strategy unraveled after a debt crisis in 2020 and subsequent bankruptcy restructuring. Several projects originating in the group's earlier era have since entered disposal proceedings, and one of the former group's largest planned investments has now reached a formal end.

Driven by surging global demand for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), Taiwanese listed companies achieved record combined profits of NT$3.4 trillion (approx. US$106.5 billion) in the first half of 2026, while their investment returns from China also rebounded. According to market research provider CRIF, Taiwanese listed firms' cumulative investment income from China reached NT$289.95 billion in the first half of 2026, an 11.12% year-over-year increase and an all-time high.