Acer channel arm Weblink International remains upbeat on the second half of 2026, even as the PC industry looks increasingly likely to see weaker demand than in the first half.
Chinese AI startup Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, has turned GLM-5.2 into the clearest test yet of China's frontier AI gap with Anthropic and OpenAI. Its stock surge is now raising a second question: whether investors are pricing a real technology shift or a thin-float capital-market fever.
AI-driven hyperscale data center expansion is pushing the global AI race beyond raw GPU computing power into a broader contest over high-speed interconnects and electro-optical integration. As Nvidia's next-generation AI factory moves toward petabyte (PB)-scale data transfers, co-packaged optics (CPO) is heading toward commercialization, lifting the importance of key components such as fiber array units (FAU) and external laser sources (ELS).
Academia Sinica has built a 20-qubit quantum chip from scratch, and the team now says the next phase is less about lab breakthroughs and more about engineering a scalable, reproducible manufacturing system. Chii-Dong Chen, executive director of Academia Sinica's Center for Quantum Computer, says Taiwan's quantum chip effort is moving into that engineering battleground.
AI companies are racing to hire forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, as the industry shifts from model-building to implementation. For global readers, the trend signals that the next wave of AI competition may hinge less on smarter systems and more on whether businesses can actually use them effectively at scale.
Apple is preparing its biggest shift yet to the release strategy for its in-house Mac processors, opting to skip high-end M6 Pro and M6 Max chips and instead bring more powerful AI-focused M7 Pro and M7 Max processors to market in 2027, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter.
Academia Sinica's Center for Quantum Computer is focusing only on hardware, not algorithms or applications, and executive director Chii-Dong Chen said that approach is similar to the mission Taiwan's government gave ITRI in the early days of the foundry industry. He said Taiwan enjoys a strong advantage in quantum chip manufacturing, but turning the new Quantum Chip Fabrication Space (QC-Fab) into a technology transfer model for private companies will still require regulatory easing.
In a corporate interview, Alexis Bateman, Head of Sustainability at Amazon Web Services (AWS), promoted the tech giant's latest environmental milestones and tools built to track data center carbon metrics. This includes the AWS Sustainability Console, a tracking hub launched to build on the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT).
Before the price hikes became official, Apple had already warned investors that soaring memory costs would increasingly pressure margins. The company has now followed through on one of the rarest moves in its history: raising prices across much of its Mac, iPad, home device, and Vision Pro lineup to offset an AI-driven surge in memory and storage costs.
Japan is moving to anchor its long-term growth strategy around AI, semiconductors, and strategic infrastructure, as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi seeks to use state-backed investment as a strategic push to lift private-sector spending and rebuild the country's industrial base.
Qualcomm used its Investor Day to formally launch Dragonfly, a new data center product line aimed at cloud AI, and set out an ambitious revenue path that would shrink its dependence on handset sales. The company said the plan could reshape its business mix by 2029, but it still faces questions over timing, product performance, and execution.
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