Kioxia Holdings is weighing construction of a new manufacturing building at its Kitakami plant in northern Japan, as rising NAND demand pushes the memory maker toward its next phase of capacity expansion beyond 2029.

The years-long tug-of-war between the US and China has witnessed a head-on showdown over technological might, as stringent export controls and tightening restrictions continue to push the world's two largest economies into increasingly tense competition across critical technology infrastructure.

Nvidia said in its fiscal 2027 second-quarter results on the 27th that it sold a small number of H200 artificial intelligence (AI) processors to Chinese customers last quarter, marking its first renewed AI chip sales to China since shipping about US$60 million of H20 chips in early 2025. But shipments fell short of the total approved by US President Donald Trump and licenses cleared by the US government in January, amid opposition from Beijing.

China is moving to address one of autonomous driving's most contentious and long-unresolved questions: when a Level 3 advanced automated driving system is engaged and a traffic violation or crash occurs, should the driver or the automaker bear responsibility? Beijing appears inclined to align with the classification standards set by SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineers), shifting liability to the automaker while Level 3 functions are active.

China is placing artificial intelligence, industrial software and open-source ecosystems at the centre of its next phase of manufacturing digitalisation, seeking to strengthen domestic software capabilities while extending platforms such as Huawei's HarmonyOS (HMOS) across consumer and industrial devices.

CXMT is narrowing the performance gap with SK Hynix in high-speed DDR5 memory, with new benchmark tests showing CXMT chips running stably at 8,000 MT/s and delivering productivity and gaming performance within about 1% of SK Hynix's latest M-die.

China's smartphone and memory supply chains are moving closer together, with Xiaomi's new Xring O3 processor potentially providing CXMT with an early commercial entry into the LPDDR6 era.

Tesla once tried to license its electrification and automated driving technologies to mainstream automakers through tech-transfer agreements, but none of those deals materialized. Today, the company is charting a different course, building out its own cloud service provider (CSP) capabilities and its Grok model while pushing into Robotaxis and Optimus humanoid robots. In China, though, regulatory reality has forced a pivot: Tesla is setting aside Grok in favor of ByteDance's localized large language model (LLM), Doubao.

Chinese panel makers' investment in next-generation OLED production is beginning to translate into reported sales at South Korean equipment suppliers, with several vendors posting sharp first-half revenue gains and large order backlogs providing further visibility as new Chinese fabs move through installation and ramp-up.

Xiaomi is expanding Xring from a smartphone chip program into a broader AI computing platform spanning consumer devices, vehicles, and edge inference, with three processors assigned to distinct workloads.

China's contract chipmakers spent the first half of 2026 proving something narrower than the headlines suggest. They demonstrated that domestic fabs can run at full capacity, raise prices, and earn money at mature nodes, largely on the strength of Chinese customers buying Chinese wafers. What the same results do not show is a country that has closed the gap where the gap actually binds — lithography, high-end metrology, and the leading edge.

Huawei and Apple are set to intensify competition in foldable smartphones in September, accelerating demand across a supply chain spanning foldable OLED panels, ultra-thin glass, hinges, flexible printed circuits and thermal components.

China's open-weight AI models have surged in usage and have now overtaken proprietary models for the first time. South China Morning Post (SCMP), citing data from US web development platform Vercel, reported that on August 25, Chinese open-weight AI models accounted for 54% of total token usage across its own calls and the agent layer AI Gateway, surpassing proprietary models for the first time.

As the humanoid robot supply chain moves closer to mass-production readiness, Taiwan's precision manufacturing sector is gaining new opportunities to enter the US market, according to DIGITIMES observations.