China's Fiberhome Telecommunication Technologies has unveiled what it claims is the world's largest optical fiber preform, highlighting China's accelerating push to strengthen its position in AI-driven optical networking and high-speed data infrastructure

Against a backdrop of persistently high tensions between the US and China, the upcoming Trump-Xi summit is being closely watched not only for its implications for trade, technology controls, and geopolitics, but also as a key signal of how both sides are reassessing the remaining areas where cooperation may still be possible

The global race for AI computing power continues to intensify, beyond ongoing GPU shortages. CPUs, long viewed as secondary components in servers, are once again becoming critical parts of data center infrastructure due to the rapid rise of AI inference and AI agent applications

As the Iran war and the geopolitical uncertainty it has triggered continue to intensify, global technology supply chains are coming under heavier-than-expected pressure. In addition to surging metal raw material prices, shortages of high-specification ISO containers used to transport helium, as well as specialty industrial solvents, are driving up production costs and threatening the stability of semiconductor manufacturing capacity

At a time when the global semiconductor industry is undergoing a historic restructuring, the Singapore Semiconductor Industry Association says Southeast Asia is evolving from a backend manufacturing base into one of the world's most resilient semiconductor supply chain hubs