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Aug 17
Record orders, yet profits squeezed: Asia-Pacific electronics supply chain caught in cost crunch

Global Electronics Association survey data show that demand across the global electronics manufacturing industry maintained steady expansion in the first half of 2026, with orders, shipments, and capacity utilization strengthening in most months. Capacity utilization, in particular, reached an all-time high since the survey began in June.

ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) have reached an agreement to strengthen copyright safeguards for the Chinese tech giant's AI video and image-generation models, marking a notable shift from confrontation toward cooperation over generative AI and intellectual property.
A new joint venture between South Korean and Indian chemical firms is betting that semiconductor materials can be made without touching China at any stage, positioning itself as an alternative supply route just as the US-China conflict pushes chipmakers to rethink where their raw materials come from.
As the AI race increasingly evolves around who can secure the most compute, develop the strongest models and convert them into commercially viable applications, SpaceX has moved another step toward controlling all three layers under one expanding ecosystem.
MediaTek widens ASIC services as market share surges
Aug 18, 07:53

MediaTek has reportedly landed major orders for Google TPU products in recent years, even appearing to challenge Broadcom's position. At a recent earnings call, MediaTek also raised its 2027 ASIC market share target to 15% to 20%, and industry watchers largely credit that goal to the breadth of MediaTek's ASIC services.

Around 2019, a friend working at a large cloud services provider excitedly shared that his team had trained a CNN model for document text recognition with good results, but the computing cost was too high to deploy directly. They then used distillation to train a smaller model for service, and it turned out to be highly effective.

The intensifying US-China technology rivalry is moving beyond export controls and semiconductor restrictions. What comes next could matter more: the formation of competing international AI ecosystems.

AI server demand pushes high-end MLCC lead times toward 40 weeks
Aug 18, 07:50
Multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) supply is increasingly diverging by product specification, with mainstream components remaining relatively stable while lead times for some high-capacitance, high-specification parts used in AI servers stretch toward 40 weeks.

As SpaceX accelerates its push into space-based AI data centers and NVIDIA brings Jetson GPUs into lunar exploration missions, the race to build computing infrastructure beyond Earth is moving from proof-of-concept experiments toward actual deployment.

European makers of vacuum pumps, heat exchangers, and industrial gases are seeing new demand from the rapid buildout of AI factories, according to Bloomberg. The shift is giving investors fresh ways to gain exposure to artificial intelligence through industrial suppliers tied to semiconductor plants and data centers.
OpenAI said its revenue chief, Denise Dresser, will step down after less than a year in the role, adding another senior departure as the artificial intelligence company moves through IPO preparations. She said on LinkedIn that she was honored to support AI development and will stay briefly to help with the transition.
South Korea's three major telecom operators generated more than KRW1 trillion (approx. US$706 billion) in combined artificial intelligence data center revenue in the first half of 2026, as demand for AI computing lifted utilization across their facilities. The companies are now expanding capacity in stages, with carriers saying they want to secure customer demand before committing to larger investments.