Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha plans to double production capacity for high-purity titanium dioxide used to make dielectric materials for multilayer ceramic capacitors, as rising AI server power requirements increase demand for the components.
China's exports of rare-earth permanent magnets reached record levels in the first half of 2026, yet the same customs data reveal a market increasingly shaped less by demand than by Beijing's discretion — flowing freely to most of the world, throttled to the US, and, since January, newly restricted to Japan.
Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology are reportedly scaling back or shelving plans to commercialize internally developed Compute Express Link (CXL) controller chips, shifting more controller work to specialist fabless suppliers while continuing to develop CXL-based memory products.
Chinese AI developer Z.ai has completed a giant data center running exclusively on domestically made chips, a milestone in Beijing's drive to replace restricted Nvidia silicon for future AI development.
South Korean semiconductor materials and parts supplier CMTX has developed a roughly 590mm single-crystal silicon ground ring for chip-etching equipment and plans to begin customer validation as it scales production of the 600mm-class ingots used to make oversized chamber components.
China's AI hardware race is shifting from individual accelerators to supernodes, optical interconnects, advanced packaging and cloud-scale systems.
A powerful rally in memory-chip stocks has stalled as investors reconsider whether record spending on AI data centers could eventually push the DRAM market back into oversupply.
Befar Group has begun producing semiconductor-grade hydrogen fluoride gas with a claimed purity of 6N, or 99.9999%, expanding the Chinese chemical supplier's presence in materials used for chip etching and chamber cleaning.
China's smartphone industry is turning agentic AI into its next growth narrative, with ZTE's Nubia, StepFun and Honor presenting sharply different visions of how phones should plan tasks, coordinate apps and process personal data.
