The US has held back from adding Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT, and more than 100 other entities to a key trade blacklist, underscoring Washington's struggle to balance national security controls with a broader effort to contain tensions with Beijing.
Toyota, Honda, and Nissan are accelerating strategy shifts as Chinese automakers rise rapidly, global EV competition intensifies, and software-defined vehicles (SDV) and AI advance, according to DIGITIMES Research. The research firm noted that Japanese automakers are moving away from scale expansion and toward profitability and smart-vehicle development, with hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) remaining the near-term growth anchor.
Synopsys celebrated the 35th anniversary of its Taiwan operations and the opening of its new Hsinchu office on June 15. During the event, Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi sat down with DIGITIMES to discuss how agentic AI is transforming electronic design automation (EDA), semiconductor development, and the future of engineering work.
The semiconductor supply chain is facing another raw material shock — this time from tungsten hexafluoride, or WF6, a specialty gas used in chip manufacturing. Planned production adjustments or exits by some Japanese suppliers in the second half of 2026 have intensified concerns over tighter global supply, sending prices sharply higher and raising the risk of disruption into 2027.
Physical AI is emerging as a new frontier of model development. Any model, however, is only as good as the data used to train it. Because of this, Japanese startup APTO is launching a physical AI infrastructure lab to help plug the data gap needed to create vision-language-action (VLA) models, with a focus on imitation learning.
Wiwynn president William Lin says AI demand has exceeded expectations, with orders so strong that even rapid global expansion still feels too slow. The server maker is expanding capacity across the Americas and Asia in 2026 and plans to add Europe as customers push hard to keep up with surging AI workloads.
AI is reshaping Taiwan into the center of a technological revolution, and the upstream and downstream supply chain is running at full speed. In an exclusive interview with DIGITIMES, Wiwynn president William Lin said AI data centers now face "three major challenges": power, cooling, and connectivity.
Optical industry leaders Largan and Genius Electronic Optical (GSEO) have recently discussed progress in co-packaged optics (CPO), a key non-smartphone growth driver, and their strategies differ sharply. As customer demand and orders become clearer and more firmly secured, both companies have also turned markedly more confident, having taken a more cautious stance in prior quarters.
Ten thousand attendees. One hundred and fifty speakers. Three exhibition floors. Two days. SuperAI Singapore 2026 generated enough keynote content, panel discussion, and product announcements to fill a week of coverage. But some of the most telling observations from the conference floor had nothing to do with any of it. Here is what I actually noticed.
TSMC's financial dominance has reached unprecedented heights, with the world's leading foundry posting first-quarter 2026 profit of over NT$570 billion (approx. US$18.04 billion) and holding an immense NT$3 trillion cash reserve. By June 11, 2026, its market value surged to NT$58.3 trillion, triggering a bizarre banking phenomenon where local financial institutions offer TSMC deposit rates that exceed its borrowing costs.
Market chatter about TSMC has intensified, with reports that its advanced process and packaging prices will rise again in the second half of 2026 and 2027, while some Google TPU production could shift to Intel, and some AMD products could be made by Samsung Electronics. TSMC CFO Wendell Huang recently told the media that global inflation and overseas fab expansion have indeed pushed up operating costs, adding that TSMC does not rule out moderate price adjustments. Those comments have drawn close attention across the industry.
Apple's WWDC 2026 keynote pointed to a major shift in the company's platform strategy, as Apple Intelligence, Siri, and Safari moved to the center while the operating system played a far smaller role. For observers used to Apple's annual software showcase, the event looked less like an OS update and more like a preview of a cross-device AI ecosystem.
During COMPUTEX 2026 and Nvidia GTC Taipei, energy once again dominated the AI data center conversation — only this time the question was not whether enough electricity existed, but whether it could arrive on time, arrive clean, and sustain 24/7 carbon-free operations.
Humanoid robots are attracting global interest, and COMPUTEX 2026 has opened its first robotics zone. Yet Taiwanese suppliers are focusing on physical AI, including AI computing platforms, edge AI, and application solutions. This reflects Taiwan's strengths in ICT and semiconductors, as well as the hurdles facing commercial humanoid robots worldwide.
The artificial intelligence boom has created clear winners among semiconductor and memory manufacturers. Shares of companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have climbed as demand for AI memory chips continues to surge.
