Taiwan's four largest motherboard brands have cut their 2026 shipment forecasts for a second time as memory and CPU shortages, rising component prices, and weaker upgrade demand deepen the PC market downturn, according to supply-chain sources.

Moonshot AI's open-source large language model (LLM) Kimi K3 has surged in popularity after its launch, drawing attention across multiple model benchmarks and forcing the company to suspend new member subscriptions after a rapid influx of users strained computing capacity. A review of CEO Zhilin Yang's March 2026 technical talk at Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California, shows K3 was not an overnight hit, but the result of months of work on model architecture and training techniques.

Chinese AI developer Z.ai has completed a giant data center running exclusively on domestically made chips, a milestone in Beijing's drive to replace restricted Nvidia silicon for future AI development.

As the AI boom keeps memory shortages running hot, steep price hikes for smartphones in the second half of 2026 are coming into view. Global market researchers have issued increasingly bleak forecasts, warning that "chipflation" could last through 2027 and that surging memory prices are already lifting the cost of consumer devices.

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, held July 17-20 across "three districts and four venues" with more than 1,100 exhibitors, one phrase recurred across vendor booths and keynotes: the "token factory".

TSMC has announced an additional US$100 billion investment in the US on top of its existing US$165 billion commitment, expanding its Arizona footprint to 12 fabs and one R&D center. While the market has focused on the size of the spending, investors are more concerned that overseas expansion could squeeze profitability.

China's AI hardware race is shifting from individual accelerators to supernodes, optical interconnects, advanced packaging and cloud-scale systems.