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Monday 14 September 2026
AI demand lifts UMC, VIS, PSMC revenue
After mature-node price competition from 2023 to 2025, AI demand has spread from GPUs and HBM to power management ICs (PMICs), power components, networking chips and specialty processes. At the same time, aggressive price cutting by mature-node players in China has eased, pushing quotes for Taiwan foundries broadly higher since the start of 2026.
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Tuesday 15 September 2026
Chinese chip tools reach 35% of equipment installed at local fabs
Chinese-made semiconductor equipment accounted for roughly 35% of tools installed at fabs in China in 2025, up from about 25% a year earlier, as domestic suppliers gain ground in key process-equipment markets.
Tuesday 15 September 2026
AI's next bottleneck may be profitability, not compute, SK chair warns
For years, as the heat surrounding AI continued to build, competitiveness across the industry was largely measured by brute-force computing power. The broader infrastructure race was dominated by a frenzy of data-center buildouts, where speed, scale and safety emerged as the three core thresholds to meet in the agentic AI era.
Tuesday 15 September 2026
South Korean firms hold 80% of the automotive OLED market
South Korean panel makers command about 80% of the automotive OLED market, according to Sigmaintell, as electrification and smarter vehicles keep demand for car displays stable and drive growth in new applications such as head-up displays. Competition is set to intensify as China's LCD makers press into higher-end automotive screens.
Tuesday 15 September 2026
XPeng's Turing chip expands beyond cars
XPeng Motors is extending its self-developed Turing AI chip from intelligent electric vehicles (EVs) into humanoid robots, broadening the processor's role in the company's Physical AI strategy. Originally designed for intelligent driving, the chip is now also used in XPeng's IRON humanoid robot. On September 8, the company launched its robot production line, with the first IRON completing automated final assembly.
Tuesday 15 September 2026
China sets first AI-brain-computer interface medical device standard

China has introduced what it says is the world's first medical-device standard for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that use AI to process electroencephalogram (EEG) data, marking a step toward tighter regulation and commercialization of the emerging technology.

Tuesday 15 September 2026
Hyundai Motor Group bets on data, Nvidia, and in-house AI to speed autonomous driving rollout
Hyundai Motor Group is moving to standardize its autonomous driving hardware, deepen its data pipeline, and accelerate in-house AI development as it prepares a staggered rollout of mass-production vehicles from 2028 through 2029. The strategy highlights how the group plans to compete not only on vehicle features, but also on learning speed, data scale, and software iteration.
Tuesday 15 September 2026
Xiaomi-backed Nuclei Sys tests public markets with RISC-V expansion still costly

Chinese RISC-V chip designer Nuclei System Technology has formally begun its IPO process, seeking fresh capital while heavy R&D spending continues to outweigh revenue despite gross margins above 80%.

Tuesday 15 September 2026
Wuliangye skips carmaking, turns liquor waste into silicon-carbon anodes

Chinese baijiu (white liquor) producer Wuliangye, or "Five Grain Liquid," is moving into battery materials by turning distillers' grains, a liquor-production by-product, into biomass porous carbon for silicon-carbon anodes.

Tuesday 15 September 2026
China reshapes cockpit display race, set to produce 84% of global AR-HUDs by 2031

S&P Global Mobility senior research analyst for connected cars and user experience in Asia-Pacific Quan Zhang shared the latest forecasts for the cockpit display and head-up display (HUD) markets.

Tuesday 15 September 2026
Commentary: CIOE 2026 reveals the harder race behind AI optical interconnects

The 2026 China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE) closed with 800G and 1.6T optical modules still dominating the show floor, while near-packaged optics (NPO), co-packaged optics (CPO), and eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics (XPO) gained a visibly larger presence.

Tuesday 15 September 2026
Sigmaintell: Memory shortage to ease in 2027 before chip growth hits 2029 wall

After months of tight supply and sharp price increases in 2026, the global memory market is expected to see its supply-demand gap narrow significantly in 2027 as DRAM capacity expands and demand patterns shift, according to Beijing-based Sigmaintell Consulting. The consultancy expects the memory and broader semiconductor markets to continue growing through 2028, but forecasts a potential pullback in 2029 as evolving AI applications reshape demand.

Tuesday 15 September 2026
CXMT rides AI boom to 80% operating margin

China's leading DRAM maker, CXMT Corporation (CXMT), formerly known as ChangXin Memory Technologies, is reaping a windfall from price gains in general-purpose memory as the AI boom reshapes the market. In the second quarter of 2026, CXMT posted an operating margin of about 82% on an EBIT basis, ranking near the top among major memory vendors and underscoring how Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron's shift of more resources into HBM has made CXMT one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current price surge.

Monday 14 September 2026
Fujitsu's Monaka targets 2027 mass production with TSMC 2nm boost
Fujitsu is preparing to take its advanced AI CPU overseas, with sales set to begin as early as 2027 in Japan, the US, and Asia. The company is betting on Monaka, a high-efficiency, power-saving chip developed with technologies refined through its work on the Fugaku supercomputer, to regain competitiveness in advanced logic ICs as demand for AI inference surges.
Monday 14 September 2026
Behind the BRICS handshake: How far can the China-India reset go?
China and India are again trying to stabilise one of Asia's most consequential bilateral relationships, with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi using the BRICS summit in New Delhi to signal cooperation despite persistent tensions over the border, trade, investment and technology.
Monday 14 September 2026
Samsung, SK Hynix reject US$19 billion power prepayment as Korea speeds chip expansion

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have rejected a proposal to prepay KRW25 trillion (approx. US$18.7 billion) in electricity bills, highlighting the financing challenge facing South Korea as it accelerates semiconductor expansion and the power infrastructure needed to support it.