Chinese automakers are accelerating their expansion into humanoid robotics, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, electric drive systems, and supply chain resources developed through their automotive businesses, according to DIGITIMES Intelligence.

Chun Yuan Steel expects Taiwan's auto market to deliver its strongest quarter of 2026 in the final three months, lifting full-year new-vehicle sales to 430,000 units from 411,000 in 2025. The steel processor also anticipates fresh growth opportunities as Kuozui Motors begins exporting finished vehicles to Japan, potentially strengthening Taiwan's position in Toyota Motor's global production network.

As the high power density of AI data centers (AIDCs) becomes an increasingly pressing issue, industry experts are highlighting the importance of power management and power usage effectiveness (PUE). To alleviate bottlenecks in grid infrastructure, AIDC projects must assess feeder capacity, matching accuracy for renewable power sources, and power management when selecting sites.

Japan is stepping up its push into physical AI, with major technology companies and research institutions showcasing advances in autonomous robot learning, motion sensing, and agricultural automation at CEATEC 2026.

A sharp sell-off across artificial intelligence infrastructure stocks has turned a quiet worry about debt into a main concern for Wall Street. The sudden drop in stock and bond prices for CoreWeave, a fast-growing cloud provider backed by Nvidia, has raised questions about whether the heavy borrowing used to fund the AI expansion is becoming too risky.

Strong global demand for AI infrastructure hardware is prompting buyers to secure capacity through advance payments and long-term contracts, driving Taiwan's semiconductor, packaging and testing, memory, substrate, and equipment supply chains to expand aggressively. Private investment in Taiwan is projected to reach a record NT$6.9539 trillion (US$215.4 billion) in 2026 as companies build factories, purchase equipment, import raw materials, and hire workers to meet customer demand.

At SEMICON West 2026, US officials and lawmakers promoted domestic manufacturing and AI export policies, while industry executives warned that supplier shortages, the premium for US-made products, and export controls could undermine the country's semiconductor ambitions.

Meta on Thursday released the weights of Muse Spark Open, which it calls the most capable US open-weight model to date. The company said the multimodal model has 816 billion total parameters (42 billion active) and a one-million-token context window, and is built for coding and agentic work. Meta said the weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face, Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. It also said the model received extra safety post-training and met the thresholds of its internal risk framework.

TSMC addressed pricing adjustments, CPUs, and advanced packaging at its earnings briefing on October 15, 2026, confirming that demand for CPUs related to agentic AI continues to rise as overall AI demand remains strong.

Singapore-based data center developer DayOne has secured an additional MYR15 billion (US$3.67 billion) in financing from a consortium of seven banks to expand hyperscale data center capacity in Johor, Malaysia, Reuters reported on October 13, 2026. Together with MYR15 billion in multicurrency financing secured in 2025, the platform now stands at MYR30 billion, according to a joint statement from the lenders cited by The Business Times.

As GenAI accelerates, e-commerce is shifting from traditional traffic management toward AI-assisted shopping and intelligent operations. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce platform Shopline said its gross merchandise value (GMV) grew 20% in 2026 from 2025, 2.5 times the market average, highlighting strong performance amid intense retail competition.