A rare gallium nitride (GaN) patent clash dominated the opening day of electronica Shanghai 2026, after China's Innoscience accused Infineon of displaying GaN power products covered by a Chinese court injunction.
As Taiwan becomes the core of the global AI hardware supply chain, Qnity — the century-old company spun off from US chemicals giant DuPont and separately listed — is likewise expanding its production capacity investment in Taiwan. Asia-Pacific president Dennis Chen said in an interview with DIGITIMES that future investment will center closely on three main battlegrounds: advanced processes, advanced packaging, and thermal management.
Protecting patents around the world is a core value for any R&D-driven company. It is also a commitment to partnering with customers. In 2025, glass giant Corning filed nearly 400 patent applications and close to 1,000 international applications. Its active patent portfolio now totals around 11,400 patents worldwide.
For more than a decade, Apple built one of the industry's most profitable business models by using its purchasing power to drive down memory and component costs before turning hardware upgrades into high-margin revenue. The AI-driven boom in HBM and DRAM is now challenging that strategy.
As the electronics industry enters the second half of 2026, it is approaching what has traditionally been the peak season for demand. However, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have disrupted normal business cycles across many applications, making seasonal patterns far less predictable. According to industry sources, this season is particularly uncertain. Rising component prices and supply shortages have made downstream procurement behavior and end-market consumption patterns more difficult to predict than in the past. Demand signals that the industry once relied upon have become distorted.
Apple's latest round of price increases for Macs, MacBooks, and iPads has unsettled investors and weighed on Asian technology markets, but the reaction may be disproportionate to the likely impact on demand. While higher prices will inevitably slow some purchases, Apple's premium positioning, loyal customer base, and selective pricing strategy suggest the broader implications for shipments and the supply chain are likely to remain manageable.
AI is turning memory from an inventory risk into a strategic resource. As memory becomes integral to platform and system design, customers are securing supply earlier, making availability increasingly critical to product launches, says Winbond Electronics president James Chen.
Jack Ma recently made a rare public appearance with senior executives from Alibaba and Ant Group at a rice-planting event outside Hangzhou. Although Alibaba chairman Joseph Tsai was absent, CEO Eddie Wu, chief scientist Jingren Zhou and Ant Group chairman Eric Jing were photographed planting rice seedlings alongside the company's founder.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping the dynamics of competition in the global technology landscape. From hyperscale data center expansion and government-backed sovereign AI initiatives to surging enterprise demand for high-performance computing, AI-driven investment in infrastructure and applications has become the industry's primary growth engine. In this race, companies that secure key positions across the AI supply chain are expected to hold a competitive advantage for years to come.
Micron Technology is turning the AI memory boom into a new Wall Street story: not just record DRAM, NAND and HBM demand, but stronger free cash flow, long-term customer commitments and a clearer path to shareholder returns.
The race to commercialize physical AI and autonomous robots is running into a fundamental challenge: existing robot safety frameworks were designed for deterministic systems operating in controlled environments, not for autonomous machines making decisions in dynamic, unstructured ones.
Google released a 30,000-word AI roadmap on June 14 that, for the first time, clearly defines AI having the capability of 100 million humans as a key milestone on the path to artificial superintelligence (ASI). The plan outlines a three-stage evolution from today's large models to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and then ASI, reinforcing expectations that AI capabilities will keep expanding at an exponential pace.
Over the past decade, annual venture capital invested in physical AI and robotics startups has surged from a few hundred million US dollars to nearly US$25 billion, more than a 10x increase concentrated in recent years.
