Apple has finally unveiled the long-anticipated foldable iPhone Duo, with former CEO Tim Cook making a brief appearance at the start of the launch video. The moment suggested the device was Cook's farewell act, rather than John Ternus' first turn as chief executive, even as Apple used the 2026 fall event to frame its next stage of AI strategy.

Advanced packaging is stretching semiconductor inspection in two directions at once: packages are getting larger while the features inside them are getting smaller.

Advanced packaging is reshaping the semiconductor value chain, making materials innovation a key source of technical breakthroughs. As large-format panel-level packaging (PLP) gains traction, Resonac CTO for semiconductor materials Hidenori Abe told DIGITIMES that the company sees five major materials challenges: warpage, plating, coating, bonding, and polishing.

King Slide Works posted the fastest revenue growth in August among the 50 Taiwan-listed AI supply chain companies tracked by DIGITIMES, with sales up 318% from a year earlier. It marked the fourth consecutive month that the server rail kit maker more than doubled its revenue, following gains of 161% in May, 200% in June and 315% in July.

Taiwan's traditional manufacturers are warning that the island's growth story is widening a long-running labor gap, as semiconductor and AI server demand lifts the economy even as factories struggle to hire and retain skilled workers. In the auto supply chain, where smart vehicle electronics are increasingly essential, companies say the workforce shortage is becoming a structural risk.

Infineon COO Alexander Gorski told DIGITIMES in an exclusive interview at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 that the company's new Dresden fab is ramping at twice the pace of prior expansions, boosted by AI tools and a single virtual fab strategy. He said the facility could reach full capacity in two to three years as demand from the market and from AI takes off.

Infineon COO Alexander Gorski told DIGITIMES in an exclusive interview at Semicon Taiwan 2026 that the current global chip shortage is unlike the one during Covid-19 and will take longer to resolve. He also discussed progress on Infineon's new Dresden plant, in-house manufacturing, outsourcing, and the company's global footprint.

Taiwanese companies are only at the start of a broader overseas investment cycle, as Washington signals possible new semiconductor tariffs and Taipei moves to deepen industrial links with Europe, Japan, and ASEAN. Officials say the island's chipmakers are responding to pressure from the US, while also broadening their global strategy to reduce risk and strengthen supply chains.

"Demo is not a product," Jingwei Hirain president Chengjian Fan told DIGITIMES in an interview, arguing that China's new-energy vehicle industry has learned hard lessons as fast-moving startups, deep in-house development, and tougher supplier scrutiny reshape the market. He said software demand has increased more than tenfold compared with the internal combustion engine era, while the fastest mass-production delivery cycle in China has been as short as 12 months.

Excitement is growing among investors and the public over the rising capabilities of humanoid robots. Yet as robot makers seek to turn their lab-built innovations into real-world commercial tools, one key bottleneck has emerged: safety.

China's memory industry is shifting from a single-champion model towards a three-pronged structure. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is building its position in DRAM, Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) in 3D NAND, while Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing (XMC) is concentrating its next phase on NOR Flash, 3D integration and optoelectronics.

As end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving architectures gradually become mainstream, the inference demands of physical AI are driving radical transformations in automotive system-on-chip (SoC) design. DIGITIMES Intelligence analyst Jasper Jiang notes that neural processing units (NPUs), or dedicated AI accelerators, are becoming the core processing engines of next-generation automotive SoCs to satisfy three stringent demands of AI inference in autonomous driving: ultra-low latency, reduced system power consumption, and minimized memory bottlenecks.

I visited Automation Taipei 2026 in mid-August, where the show looked lively and occupied a footprint 7% larger than in 2025. Physical AI and vision-language-action (VLA) models dominated the venue. Yet most robots on display still repeated fixed motions behind barriers, highlighting how far robotics has to go to move from automation to autonomy.

India's fixed wireless access (FWA) market is expanding quickly as 5G rollouts accelerate and policymakers push local manufacturing, but Taiwanese networking suppliers say the opportunity comes with familiar risks. Telecom demand in the country remains strong, yet vendors with experience in India warn that growth does not automatically translate into profit.

TIME unveiled its 2026 TIME100 AI list on August 27 with a notable change in its China lineup. DeepSeek founder Wenfeng Liang, named among the "Leaders" in 2025, disappeared from this year's list, while Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) co-CEO Mong-song Liang made a rare appearance.