Shinko Electric Industries announced on September 30 it has signed a purchase agreement to acquire the Mobara Fab from Japan Display (JDI) in Mobara City, Chiba Prefecture. The transaction is intended to establish a new core production hub dedicated to high-end semiconductor packaging, addressing surging global demand for AI accelerators and data center applications.
DB HiTek has raised foundry prices by as much as 30%, with Chinese customers facing the steepest increases as rising orders push the South Korean foundry's 8-inch capacity close to full utilization, according to The Elec.
Huawei rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company's Ascend AI accelerators have surpassed Nvidia in both sales and market share in China, highlighting how US export controls on advanced AI chips are accelerating the shift of China's data center and AI industries toward domestic suppliers.
The global solar module market is undergoing a significant geographic shift in 2026. China remains the world's largest source of module demand, but its share of global shipments is set to fall below 40%, down 12 percentage points year-over-year, while Europe and India continue to gain ground.
ACM Research (Shanghai)'s order backlog has surged alongside China's semiconductor equipment expansion, giving the Shanghai-listed chip-tool maker a larger base of future deliveries while AI-related capacity investment and localization continue to support demand.
Under pressure from rising memory prices, Samsung Electronics has raised the South Korean launch prices of its Galaxy S26 series about seven months after release. Most models went up by KRW149,600(US$110), while the top-end Galaxy S26 Ultra 1TB rose to KRW2.8215 million.
Huawei unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone series on October 1, with Richard Yu, Huawei executive director and chairman of the Consumer BG, introducing the new devices alongside a new generation of in-house chips and imaging hardware. Every model in the Mate 90 lineup, from the standard version to the flagship tier, uses Huawei's latest self-developed Tau (τ) chip platform.
China's BOE Technology is seeking closer ties with Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics as the display maker expands beyond panels into semiconductor glass substrates and advanced packaging.
Samsung Electronics brought global AI experts and researchers together in Seoul on September 30 for the Samsung AI Forum 2026, exploring how agentic AI and physical AI can deliver measurable business value across enterprise workflows, device-side applications, and semiconductor design and manufacturing.
OpenAI said it detected and blocked an organized adversarial distillation attack, with some activity linked to Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI. The company said it first spotted the effort on July 1 and saw a peak on July 24 and 25, when it detected about 16,000 related requests from more than 4,000 users.
Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics are redesigning how memory is packaged with flagship smartphone processors, as rising chip performance puts greater pressure on the limited cooling capacity of mobile devices.
China Rare Earth Innovation Technology and Beijing-based Direct Drive Tech signed a strategic cooperation agreement on September 29 to jointly develop high-performance magnetic materials for direct-drive motors, including neodymium-iron-boron magnets, flux-concentrating rings, and radially oriented magnetic rings, linking upstream rare-earth resources with robot drive modules.
China's humanoid robot market continued to expand rapidly in the first half of 2026, with shipments exceeding 19,000 units and accounting for about 77.9% of the global total. Chinese suppliers, meanwhile, represented more than 95% of worldwide shipments, underscoring China's position as both the largest humanoid robot market and the industry's dominant source of supply.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the Korea Society's annual dinner in New York on September 28 local time and received the 2026 Van Fleet Award, with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won on hand to congratulate him. The appearance underscored how Nvidia's ties with South Korea's semiconductor makers have expanded from memory supply into AI manufacturing, creating a two-way relationship in products and technology.
