Taiwan's automation industry is moving beyond the traditional race over robot-arm payload, servo precision, and sensor resolution. At the 2026 Automation Taipei and Taiwan Automation Intelligence and Robot Show, held August 19-22 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, the industry's major players all put the spotlight on AI software-hardware integration platforms and open robot architectures as the technologies will determine the next phase of competition.

Xiaomi is preparing to take its in-house smartphone silicon further upmarket, with founder and chairman Lei Jun confirming that a new generation of its Xring chip is on the way. Supply-chain sources say the chip has already returned from fabrication, completed initial power-on testing and moved into the device integration stage.

Apple's spatial computing ambitions are narrowing rather than disappearing, but the direction is increasingly clear: fewer people are building VR headsets, and more are building AI-driven smart glasses.

Optical communications will likely enter AI server racks in 2028, DIGITIMES analyst Joyce Chen said on August 20 at a semiconductor industry forum in Taipei, as rising AI cluster scale drives demand for faster data transfer, lower latency, and higher-bandwidth interconnects.

HP Korea is sharpening its localized AI strategy through a partnership with large language model (LLM) startup Upstage, and has already moved into AI transformation (AX), eyeing demand from document-heavy industries such as healthcare and finance. Built around high-performance AI workstations, the company is offering an end-to-end pipeline from scanning and inference to printing, helping HP break out of its image as only a PC supplier in the South Korean market.

Chinese electronics manufacturer Goertek reported higher revenue and profit for the first half of 2026, supported by growth in its smart acoustic products and continued investment in R&D.

Ode with Anthropic, an Anthropic venture arm, said it has acquired Casper Studios, a move that expands its enterprise artificial intelligence services as companies worldwide look for practical ways to deploy AI inside existing workflows. The deal underscores growing demand for partners that can turn experimentation into measurable business gains across global operations.

A shift to 800VDC power architectures in next-generation AI data centers is gathering pace, with implications for GPU planning, power semiconductor demand, and rack design. Many vendors are preparing related products for 2026, as rising AI workloads push power systems toward a new scale. The trend may accelerate adoption across gallium nitride (GaN), silicon carbide (SiC), and Vertical Power Delivery (VPD) technologies.

Taiwan's export orders climbed by US$207.3 billion, or 52.5%, in the first seven months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, according to data released on August 20 by the Department of Statistics (DOS) under Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). From January to July 2026, orders placed by the US reached US$235.7 billion, accounting for 39.1% of the total US$602 billion in orders, rising more than 70% year over year and making the US Taiwan's largest buyer.

Stripe is in acquisition talks to buy AI startup OpenRouter for more than US$7 billion, according to reporting by Bloomberg and Axios. The price would be more than five times the US$1.3 billion valuation OpenRouter reached in a funding round in May 2026.