Japanese autonomous driving developer Tier IV is developing an AI chip and will release its chip design and related toolchain as open source, allowing semiconductor manufacturers to use them to develop autonomous driving chips. The company aims to break Nvidia's dominant position in the autonomous driving chip market.
Huawei has unveiled the OceanStor M900 at Huawei Connect 2026, extending its AI infrastructure strategy into memory and storage with a petabyte-scale key-value (KV) cache system designed for AI agents and long-context inference.
Japanese semiconductor materials leader Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK) held a completion ceremony on September 15, 2026, for a new KRW101 billion (US$73.1 million) production plant in the Poseung District of Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province.
Huawei expects autonomous AI agents to become the dominant source of AI traffic over the next decade, creating a sharp increase in demand for computing, networking, storage and power infrastructure.
ByteDance has completed a US$290 million funding round for Anew Labs, its AI drug-discovery business spun off from the Chinese technology group, valuing the company at US$1.5 billion, according to Reuters. ByteDance will retain a 56% stake following the fundraising.
Consolidation chatter within China's automotive industry has reignited following an announcement by Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC Group). Late on September 14, GAC disclosed that it had entered into a non-binding intent agreement with China First Automobile Group (FAW). Under the proposed transaction, GAC intends to acquire a partial stake in an undisclosed vehicle joint venture held by FAW via the issuance of new GAC shares. Upon completion of the share swap, FAW is expected to emerge as GAC's second-largest shareholder.
South Korea's semiconductor boom is spilling over from corporate profits into government tax revenue. Corporate tax revenue for fiscal 2027 is projected to reach KRW216.7 trillion (about US$160 billion), up 113.9% from the 2026 supplementary budget, topping KRW200 trillion for the first time and, after 15 years, overtaking income tax as the country's largest tax source.
