China's push to build a domestic semiconductor equipment industry is beginning to cut into revenue at major Japanese toolmakers, with five major Japanese suppliers posting a combined 12% drop in China sales for the fiscal year ended March 2026, Nikkei reported.
Samsung Electronics is putting long-term memory supply agreements higher on its second-half agenda as demand from data centers broadens beyond high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, into server DRAM and storage products.
SoftBank Group said it will prioritize building large-scale terrestrial AI data-center capacity rather than pursuing space-based data centers, with founder Masayoshi Son arguing that the decisive advantage in artificial intelligence will come from compute infrastructure deployed on Earth.
Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST, also known as Ambandha), operator of China's Qianfan low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet constellation, has launched a new funding round as the country's commercial space sector transitions from proof-of-concept to scaled deployment.
Industrial gas manufacturer Nippon Sanso Holdings announced it will raise prices for all helium products in the Japanese market starting in July 2026, with an average price increase of more than 30%. Affected products include helium used in key applications such as semiconductor front-end process wafer cooling and medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment. The move is mainly driven by geopolitical instability in the Middle East.
South Korea has moved its Physical AI Alliance from a policy-setting body into an operational platform, as the government and companies such as Naver deepen cooperation with Nvidia on physical AI, AI factories and large-scale computing infrastructure.
Infineon and InnoScience are escalating their global GaN patent dispute across the US, Germany, and China, with each side scoring wins in infringement suits that are already affecting real-world sales. Sources familiar with the matter say the latest rulings are effectively pushing the two companies into separate market territories.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics has begun mass production of advanced package substrates for Qualcomm's first data center AI accelerator, extending the companies' supply relationship from mobile and PC chips into server-class semiconductors, ZDNet Korea reported.
