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Thursday 7 May 2026
From chips to telecoms, South Korea faces an AI-era labor reckoning
Labor tensions across South Korea's technology sector are intensifying, and the conflict is no longer confined to traditional disputes between workers and management. Increasingly, the country's AI-driven economic transformation is exposing fractures within workforces themselves, as employees in faster-growing business divisions demand a larger share of corporate profits. In contrast, weaker divisions struggle to keep pace
Thursday 7 May 2026
ByteDance's Doubao tests paid AI tiers to challenge ChatGPT subscriptions
China's AI market has expanded rapidly through free and low-cost offerings, but rising computing costs and deeper enterprise adoption are beginning to reshape the sector's business models. ByteDance-backed Doubao is now testing paid subscription plans priced between CNY68–500 (US$9–69) per month, signaling a formal shift toward tiered monetization
Thursday 7 May 2026
Exclusive: China's automakers leap forward in next generation of car architecture

As the global auto industry shifts toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), the evolution of electronic and electrical architectures has become one of the most important determinants of future competitiveness

Thursday 7 May 2026
China token prices rise while US hyperscalers flood AI infrastructure
Generative AI demand is intensifying the global race for computing power, widening the gap between China and the US in AI infrastructure investment. Yet while US hyperscalers continue to expand capex aggressively, China's AI market is seeing token prices rise rather than fall, signalling that pricing is increasingly shaped by supply constraints and evolving AI business models rather than investment scale alone
Thursday 7 May 2026
EU joins telecom coalition as 6G rivalry with China intensifies

The European Union has become the first strategic partner of the Global Coalition on Telecommunications, or GCOT, expanding a Western-led telecom policy framework as governments seek to shape next-generation network infrastructure and the race toward 6G

Thursday 7 May 2026
Gen5 SSD race shifts to power and AI: Micron, YMTC diverges
As demand for PCs and edge AI accelerates, the consumer SSD market is entering a transition to the PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) era. For notebooks — long a core OEM segment — power consumption and thermal limits have become the decisive barriers to large-scale adoption of next-generation SSDs
Wednesday 6 May 2026
China's cloud providers raise AI prices as model usage surges
Rising demand for generative AI is prompting major Chinese cloud providers to raise prices for large-scale services and data products, with implications for global AI users and developers, as usage-based billing and efficiency become central to costs and deployment decisions across international markets and could soon influence provider strategies worldwide
Wednesday 6 May 2026
China EV exports hit 22% in 1Q26, April surge highlights overseas growth shift
As the global electric vehicle market enters a phase of structural adjustment, China's new energy vehicle makers are increasingly relying on exports to sustain growth and expand their overseas footprint
Wednesday 6 May 2026
DeepSeek pulls multimodal paper after brief release, reveals new visual reasoning approach
DeepSeek briefly released, then removed, a multimodal research paper that offers rare insight into its evolving AI strategy, drawing attention across the developer community
Wednesday 6 May 2026
SoftBank, Intel target HBM limits with 9-layer memory
SoftBank's memory unit SAIMEMORY is preparing to present a new 3D DRAM technology developed with Intel, as the AI hardware industry seeks ways to ease the power and heat constraints of high-bandwidth memory
Wednesday 6 May 2026
Samsung board chairman warns strike could disrupt chip output

Samsung Electronics' labor dispute is widening beyond a fight over bonuses, after board chairman Shin Je-yoon made a rare appeal for management and unionized workers to resolve the standoff through dialogue as a planned strike threatens to disrupt chip production, customer trust, and South Korea's broader economy

Tuesday 5 May 2026
South Korea eyes memory-led AI order against Nvidia
As AI shifts from training to inference and from single-task use to multi-agent collaboration, South Korea's semiconductor industry is seeking to recast the market around memory rather than GPUs. South Korean academia and industry figures say the AI era will be defined by memory architectures, with the country aiming to build its own framework and challenge an order long dominated by Nvidia
Tuesday 5 May 2026
AMI capacity sold out through 2028 as CCL makers race for high-end tools

The PCB industry is entering a new phase of transformation in the AI era, as rising demand for high-frequency and high-speed applications accelerates upgrades in upstream copper-clad laminate (CCL) materials. Among the beneficiaries is impregnation equipment maker Asia Metal Industries (AMI)

Tuesday 5 May 2026
As Nvidia goes to zero in China, Beijing races to fill the void
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company's share of China's data-center computing market has dropped to zero. The admission underscores how US export controls are reshaping the country's AI chip sector — and how urgently Beijing is moving to localize its semiconductor supply chain, from processors to silicon wafers
Tuesday 5 May 2026
Onsemi says China remains a strong market despite softer passenger vehicle volumes
Onsemi told investors during its first-quarter 2026 earnings call, held on May 4, that China remains a key growth market for its automotive power products, even as China's passenger vehicle market softened. The company reported that "Our China automotive revenue grew year-over-year in the first quarter, despite a decline in the China passenger vehicle market of 6% for the same period," framing the performance as evidence of rising semiconductor content and share gains within Chinese electric vehicle programs