Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) expects artificial intelligence (AI) demand to keep chip supply tight through mid-2028, even as equipment lead times of up to two years slow its own capacity build-out, executives said on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call.

Nvidia founder and former CEO Jensen Huang has agreed to appear before the US House of Representatives ahead of the holiday break, addressing export controls and related controversies. Several senior lawmakers had previously threatened to subpoena Huang over Nvidia's business strategy in China and related policy issues.

Singapore said it independently investigated Hong Kong resident Alice Huang and Singapore-registered Megaspeed International over suspected false declarations involving servers exported through Singapore, while stressing that companies must consider foreign export controls. The case highlights Singapore's position on cross-border trade, cooperation with overseas authorities, and enforcement against alleged dishonest practices.

SK Hynix's sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) production yield has reportedly surpassed 70%, Chosun Biz reported on November 12, citing semiconductor industry sources, as rival Samsung Electronics moves ahead with a major chip packaging expansion.

A dispute between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over how hard to police Nvidia chip shipments to China has moved to the center of Washington's fallout from espionage allegations involving Nvidia's former CEO, with White House officials discussing whether Lutnick should be pushed out and lawmakers pressing his department to add Chinese firms that have been left alone to its Entity List.

The loophole that lets Chinese AI developers rent Nvidia chips in overseas data centers is becoming the main target of a tougher US export-control push. Democrats swept both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterms, and the Commerce Department is moving to finalize its own remote-access rule. The stakes are large: remote access accounts for about half of the US-made AI compute that Washington could still cut off from China by the end of 2027, according to the Institute for Progress (IFP).

SMIC's record third-quarter revenue and sharper rise in operating profit point to stronger factory throughput, while the lower net result against the prior quarter shows how investment-related income can obscure the underlying manufacturing trend. The company expects sales to keep growing in the fourth quarter, but its margin guidance signals that the exceptional third-quarter level may not hold.

Samsung Electronics is targeting an exit from its 8-inch foundry business by the end of 2029, a year earlier than previously reported, and has been outsourcing some production to Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), South Korea's Dealsite reported on November 12, citing industry sources.

Qualcomm has started laying off employees in India, its largest engineering base outside the US, as the chipmaker carries out a performance-focused global workforce reduction amid a fall in smartphone chip sales.

India's release of the EKA-1, Dhīr 2B, and Dhīr 5B foundation models highlights a public-backed effort to develop multilingual AI for domestic and international use. The models range from those with large-scale reasoning and coding capabilities to lightweight, offline-capable assistants, with implications for data sovereignty, public services, enterprise deployment, and access in low-connectivity environments.

The controversy surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has grown from a personal dispute into a broader question about corporate governance, succession planning, and the shifting power structure of the global AI supply chain. With Huang's formal resignation, the AI industry faces a new period of uncertainty, and Taiwan's supply chain must reassess its partnerships, order allocations, and industry interests.

Naver said on November 12 it had signed a KRW2 trillion (approx. US$1.5 billion) AI computing services contract with a US-based AI inference company, securing its first major customer for the AI Factory business it is developing with Nvidia and Brookfield.

Tata Electronics is lining up fresh debt at a moment when nearly every leg of its expansion has run into friction: a flagship chip fab whose production start has moved from the end of 2026 to mid-2028 and will launch on an older process, losses that widened even as revenue doubled, and a run of incidents at its iPhone component plant in Tamil Nadu.

ByteDance reportedly intends to release an AI agent similar to Meta's Muse within several weeks. The firm, whose AI assistant tool Doubao has seen wide adoption within China, seeks to catch up with leading US labs within a few years, even as its co-founder has called for reducing reliance on distillation techniques.

Sharp is accelerating efforts to address its loss-making display component business. According to Nikkei, Sharp will sell its Hisai plant in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan, which produces color filters for LCD panels, to Nitto Denko. Sharp officially announced the sale on the morning of November 12. The transaction is valued at JPY22.2 billion (approximately US$139 million) and is expected to close on December 24.