When DeepSeek burst onto the scene in early 2025, it wiped nearly US$600 billion from Nvidia's market value in a single day. By the summer of 2026, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 had triggered another wave of anxiety, sharpening divisions in Silicon Valley over the growing strength of China's open models.
When John Ternus becomes chief executive on September 1, the company he inherits will be measured on a scorecard Tim Cook wrote, not the one Steve Jobs left behind. Fifteen years of accounts show two different machines wearing the same logo: Jobs ran a company that accelerated, Cook ran one that compounded. The distinction matters for Ternus, because the growth rates Cook normalized are the ones he now has to beat.
The 2026 Global Automotive and Technology Expo (GATE 2026) closed on August 28 at the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre (MITEC) in Kuala Lumpur. It highlighted Malaysia's contradictory but pragmatic stance toward China in the auto sector. Over the three-day event, the main story for ASEAN's auto industry was not a new car or new technology. It was Malaysia's balancing act around the "China factor."
China's second humanoid robot games, held in Beijing from August 22 to August 26, 2026, sent videos and clips racing across social media and underscored how fast humanoid robotics is advancing. For Taiwan, the spectacle also highlighted both the promise and the risks of robots in policing, firefighting, and even warfare.
Nvidia reported revenue of US$96.221 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, more than doubling from a year earlier and underscoring the global rush to build AI infrastructure and expand computing power. The results also signal a continued boost for Taiwan's suppliers as hyperscalers shift purchases from Blackwell to Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin.
Nvidia has made a point of it in three consecutive earnings decks: year-on-year growth has accelerated for four straight quarters, which the company calls unprecedented at its scale. It's true. But split the data center business into its two halves, and the acceleration has a single source, and it isn't the customers everyone assumes.
Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) has officially kicked off its STAR Market IPO process. In the first quarter of 2026, China's largest 3D NAND Flash manufacturer delivered an impressive performance, generating CNY47.042 billion (approx. US$7 billion) in revenue and CNY33.379 billion (approx. US$5 billion) in net profit attributable to the parent company. Remarkably, its profit in a single quarter eclipsed its cumulative net earnings from prior years. This has turned YMTC's CNY33 billion (approx. US$4.9 billion) fundraising plan into one of the most anticipated semiconductor IPO in China since ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT).
Nvidia's data center business now splits almost evenly between hyperscalers and everyone else — US$48.7 billion against US$40.3 billion in the July quarter. The obvious reading is that the customer base is broadening. The sequence says something more specific.
Nexperia China is accelerating its separation from the Dutch chipmaker's traditional European manufacturing network, raising the prospect that one of the world's largest suppliers of automotive and industrial semiconductors could operate through increasingly distinct China- and Europe-based supply chains.
Nvidia has reportedly notified major customers that server systems using its AI chips will rise by more than 15%, with the new pricing set to apply to models shipping from early 2027, including Grace Blackwell and the next-generation Vera Rubin platform. The move is expected to ripple through the chip and system supply chain, while industry figures say it could also lift the appeal of inference ASICs.
SK Hynix is moving on several fronts as it pushes deeper into system-level memory competition. From high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and high-bandwidth flash (HBF) to a recently published roadmap proposing to extend co-packaged optics (CPO) to the memory interface, the company increasingly appears to be competing not just over the next generation of HBM, but over how future artificial intelligence (AI) systems organize and access memory.
The 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC) opened in Beijing on August 19, and the biggest change on this year's show floor was not the larger number of humanoid robots — it was that robots started working on site. From coffee making and retail service to printed circuit board (PCB) handling, logistics sorting, auto parts loading and unloading, and even home organizing, laundry, and table clearing, robot makers are no longer just showing robots walking, dancing, and boxing.
Foundry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) grew 37% year to date — and still lost four percentage points of the sub-sector's revenue share, because the other 26 manufacturers grew more than twice as fast.
Thirty-eight of 43 companies grew year to date at a median rate of 28.7% — the highest of any semiconductor sub-sector — with test handlers, sockets and probe cards recurring across company filings.
