At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, held July 17-20 across "three districts and four venues" with more than 1,100 exhibitors, one phrase recurred across vendor booths and keynotes: the "token factory".

TSMC has announced an additional US$100 billion investment in the US on top of its existing US$165 billion commitment, expanding its Arizona footprint to 12 fabs and one R&D center. While the market has focused on the size of the spending, investors are more concerned that overseas expansion could squeeze profitability.

China's AI hardware race is shifting from individual accelerators to supernodes, optical interconnects, advanced packaging and cloud-scale systems.

India's smartphone market was hit by a sharp second-quarter decline that may matter well beyond the country's borders, as higher component costs lifted prices and dampened demand. The drop underscores how global memory shortages, inflation, and weaker spending are reshaping handset sales, especially in value-driven markets across Asia and emerging economies.

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has criticized Intel's past strategy in a recent interview, revisiting the company's history with Nvidia and Apple while also weighing in on Taiwan Strait tensions and the outlook for quantum computing. Speaking at the RAISE Summit AI conference in Paris, he said Intel dismissed Nvidia GPUs at the height of its CPU dominance as nothing more than graphics tools for gamers.

Microsoft has expanded its strategic partnership with AMD, announcing plans to deploy the company's upcoming Helios rack-scale AI system across Azure, a move that comes just days before AMD is expected to unveil its next-generation AI products at its Advancing AI 2026 event, which begins on July 22.