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Jul 14
Google reportedly ramps up TPU push to court Nvidia-backed cloud providers

Google is intensifying its effort to expand adoption of its in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), taking direct aim at Nvidia's dominance in AI infrastructure by courting "neocloud" providers that have traditionally built their businesses around Nvidia GPUs.

Nvidia and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are weighing a partnership under which the Japanese industrial group would supply cooling systems and energy management equipment for the artificial-intelligence data centers Nvidia is building with partners worldwide, Nikkei reported. The talks point to where the AI buildout is now bottlenecked: not chips, but the power and heat they generate.

Huawei will publicly display its Atlas 950 SuperPoD AI computing system for the first time at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, placing domestic computing infrastructure at the centre of China's flagship AI gathering.

QBit Semiconductor reported a June consolidated revenue of NT$132 million (US$4.1 million) in 2026, a record high marking a rise of 108.5% from the previous month and 41.1% from a year earlier. The Taiwan-based IC design company said its first-half revenue for 2026 reached NT$320 million, up 91.7% year on year and equal to 75% of its full-year 2025 sales.
Nam Liong Global Corporation reported consolidated revenue of NT$245 million (US$8.4 million) for June 2026, down 2.56% from the previous month but up 21.66% year over year, reflecting mid-year inventory adjustments by some customers and normal seasonal shipment patterns. Second-quarter revenue reached NT$743 million, rising 23.73% sequentially and 17.07% from a year earlier. Revenue for the first half totaled NT$1.343 billion, up 8.87% year over year.
AI image sensor chips have become a key market for Taiwan's IC design firms, with major players such as Novatek Microelectronics, Realtek Semiconductor, and Himax Technologies, as well as mid-sized companies including Sunplus Technology, Egis Technology, and Etron Technology, all stepping up their efforts. Among firms also pushing into drone imaging solutions, including Elan Microelectronics and PixArt Imaging, a broad consensus is emerging: compute power and price are not the real winning factors in this market.
China's IC exports surged in the first half of 2026, underscoring strong demand for AI, data center, and HPC hardware that lifted electronics supply-chain momentum. The General Administration of Customs said on July 14 that IC exports reached US$177.28 billion in the first half of 2026, up 96.1% year-over-year.
As attention in the tech industry has centered on the US tech giants and TSMC, sovereign AI has emerged as a faster-growing blue ocean for AI infrastructure providers, supply-chain players and compute-rental operators seeking better margins.
At a humanoid robotics summit in Tokyo in May 2026, I saw a consulting firm's global labor automation map for Physical AI. After returning, I recreated the same map using the firm's research on Digital AI job functions. Placing the two side by side revealed something unexpected.
Chinese contract-manufacturing giant Huaqin Technology expects its net profit for the first half of 2026 to rise between 53.5% and 61.5% year-over-year, to a range of CNY2.9 billion (approx. US$427.73 million) to CNY3.05 billion, according to a preliminary earnings pre-announcement filed with the Shanghai Stock Exchange on July 14. Revenue is projected to grow 10.8% to 13.2% to between CNY93 billion and CNY95 billion, up from CNY83.9 billion a year earlier. The company said the disclosure was triggered because net profit was set to rise more than 50%.

Six-inch silicon carbide (SiC) substrates, a third-generation semiconductor product that has faced oversupply and falling prices for the past two years, have clearly bottomed out and are even starting to recover as capacity remains constrained and demand emerges across multiple sectors. Semiconductor distributors say supply is now tight, and customers who want to buy more must pay more, with new orders becoming increasingly hard to absorb.

Trust technology company Gogolook reported June 2026 consolidated revenue of NT$110 million (approx. US$3.43 million), up 36.5% from a year earlier. Consolidated revenue for the second quarter of 2026 reached NT$310 million, an increase of 28.4% from the same period in 2025. Cumulative revenue for the first half of 2026 totaled NT$613 million, up 27.5% year over year. Both second-quarter and first-half figures reached record highs.