China's outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) companies entered the fourth quarter with rising sales, high utilization, and an industry-wide price upturn. Their third-quarter results also show how much reported profit growth rests on investment gains and lower taxes, and how heavily the sector is now spending to close an advanced packaging gap that AI demand has exposed.

Samsung Electronics plans to shut down its remaining 8-inch foundry lines by the end of 2030, forcing South Korean chip designers to seek alternative manufacturing capacity as competing foundries operate near full capacity, The Elec reported.

China's leading solar manufacturers have reported their third-quarter 2026 financial results, showing signs of improving profitability but continued heavy losses, underscoring the persistence of excess production capacity across the industry.

China's memory chip industry heads into the final quarter of 2026 riding a global supply shortage: its leading DRAM maker booked more than CNY54 billion (US$8.11 billion) in third-quarter profit, and its chip designers are still lifting sales on tight supply. The same third-quarter results also show where risks are accumulating — rapid capacity expansion, swelling inventories, and a US policy debate that could reach the equipment domestic fabs depend on.

Micron Technology and China's CXMT have taken sharply different approaches to next-generation DRAM scaling, exposing a divide over the commercial viability of 4F-squared memory-cell architecture. While CXMT is advancing 4F-squared towards commercial production to improve bit density, Micron argues that capacitor-scaling constraints undermine its cost advantages and is prioritising 6F-squared technology and a longer-term transition to 3D DRAM. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, meanwhile, are pursuing alternative development paths, highlighting the industry's competing approaches to extending DRAM density and manufacturing efficiency.

Nvidia will showcase its expanding partnerships with South Korean companies at AI Day Seoul, where Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will present semiconductor development cases using Nvidia AI technologies. LG Electronics and Doosan Robotics will demonstrate robotics technologies, while SK Telecom (SKT), Naver Cloud, and Coupang will discuss the development and operation of AI data centers and infrastructure.

China’s push for technological self-sufficiency will continue expanding its industrial overcapacity and exporting it worldwide, according to Roy Chun Lee, senior deputy executive director of the Center for International Trade Policy at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research. Lee made the remarks at a forum on global supply chain restructuring and Taiwan-US economic and trade cooperation held in Taipei on November 2.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (Semco) has begun mass production of a miniature, ultra-high-capacitance multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), as increasingly powerful automotive processors drive demand for smaller components capable of maintaining stable power supplies.

Samsung Electronics is reportedly in talks with Japanese motor maker Nidec to jointly develop robot motors as the South Korean company expands its humanoid robotics business and pushes to automate its factories.

Z.ai co-founder Tang Jie has identified recursive self-improvement (RSI) as a critical pathway towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), arguing that AI systems capable of improving their own development processes could transform research while creating new risks for human oversight.

Denso, Japan's largest auto parts maker, reported falling profits for the first half of fiscal 2026 as surging memory and other component costs, driven partly by the AI boom, offset revenue growth. The company said it will pass some costs on to customers when necessary while securing supplies through long-term contracts.

Tokyo Electron (TEL) forecasts nearly 90% annual operating-profit growth as chipmakers accelerate capital spending to meet demand for AI hardware, despite mounting concerns over an AI bubble. The company also announced a JPY150 billion share buyback program.

Samsung Electronics plans to acquire Samsung Display's entire 10.16% stake in China's TCL CSOT for KRW1.2718 trillion (approx. US$960 million), moving the investment from its OLED-focused subsidiary to the parent company, whose TV business continues to rely on Chinese LCD panel suppliers.

Chinese AI chipmaker Iluvatar CoreX has released benchmarks showing its next-generation Tiangai 300 general-purpose GPU outperforming Nvidia's H200 in selected large language model (LLM) inference, long-context processing and multimodal generation workloads.

Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong visited the company's Advanced Package Lab (APL) in Yokohama, Japan, on November 1, as the chipmaker looks to Japan's semiconductor materials and equipment industry to strengthen its advanced packaging capabilities for AI processors.