WinWay Technologies said orders from AI customers and stronger demand for advanced testing products lifted shipments in the second quarter of 2026, with revenue rising for a fourth straight quarter on a sequential basis. The semiconductor test interface maker said it expects momentum to continue into the third quarter of 2026 as order visibility improves and new capacity comes online.
Wistron expects stronger AI server growth in August 2026 after reporting July revenue of NT$308.22 billion (approx. US$9.53 billion), down 4.2% month-over-month but up 60.8% year-over-year. Revenue for the first seven months reached NT$2.05 trillion, up 88.2% from a year earlier. The company expects AI server shipments to grow sequentially throughout the second half of 2026.
Ibiden said on August 4 that it raised its fiscal 2026 outlook after stronger-than-expected demand from generative AI and a recovery in the general-purpose server market lifted results in the first quarter. The Japan-based IC substrate maker now expects full-year net profit to rise, reversing an earlier forecast for a decline.
The global automobile industry has been at the cusp of a critical transition into electrification and smart technologies, and the focus of future competition in the industry will move beyond mere performance to software-hardware integration, smart applications, and the building of cross-industry ecosystems, according to Larry Chang, director of planning and research and head of automobile electrification outreach at the Mechanical and Mechatronics Systems Research Labs (MMSL) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).
The United Arab Emirates is considering investing as much as JPY1 trillion (approx. US$6.3 billion) in a 500MW artificial intelligence data center in Akita Prefecture, according to Bloomberg. Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment is expected to lead the investment in a project that could become Japan's largest data center.
Malaysia is reviewing limits on unprocessed rare earth exports as investors seek access and governments worldwide race to secure strategic minerals. Any policy shift could affect supply chains far beyond Southeast Asia, shaping how global manufacturers, defense industries, and clean-energy firms source critical materials in an increasingly geopoliticized market.
China's cyberspace authority said it has begun to scrutinize products sold by US cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks within the country, citing risks to national security and critical infrastructure in its decision. This takes place during a time of heightened tensions between the US and China over technology supply chains and AI advancements.
MP Materials' second quarter is best read as a status report on an industrial contest. On the one hand, China has tightened its grip on the parts of the rare earth chain that matter most for defense and high-performance motors. On the other hand, the US is paying to stand up a parallel supply chain inside a single company.
Chinese large language model (LLM) developers are beginning to move away from aggressive price competition, with leading players reportedly introducing higher prices and new commercial licensing models as they seek more sustainable returns on growing AI investments.
A proposed US ban on new Chinese optical transceivers could disrupt the build-out of AI data centers before Western suppliers have enough capacity to replace Chinese production, raising the risk of higher costs, delayed cluster deployments and stranded GPU capacity.
Nvidia Senior Vice President of Networking Gilad Shainer said the company is building the key network architecture and optical interconnect technologies needed for AI factory deployments at scale, in a DIGITIMES interview ahead of the OCP APAC Summit on August 11-12, 2026. He said the biggest shift in AI factories is that the computing unit is no longer a single server but the entire data center, while Nvidia's announcement that co-packaged optics (CPO) switch has entered mass production signals a new round of upgrades for the optical communications industry and the AI networking market.
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