DIGITIMES: News and Insight of the Global Supply Chain

Blade Hydrogen Green Technology targets waste hydrogen power for AIDC

Rodney Chan — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:21:26 GMT

As electricity demand from AI data centers and the semiconductor industry climbs rapidly, Blade Hydrogen Green Technology is tapping industrial byproduct hydrogen and mixed-hydrogen fuel cell technology to turn waste hydrogen into power and support low-carbon electricity supplies for AI data centers (AIDCs) and other sites. The startup has expanded its fuel cell power equipment from 30kW to 150kW and has installed a cumulative 1.65MW of generating capacity in Taiwan.

Advantech's North America expansion signals a deeper shift toward local manufacturing, services

Jingyue Hsiao — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:21:16 GMT

Advantech is expanding manufacturing, engineering, and fulfillment capabilities in North America as demand grows for locally designed and assembled systems across industrial technology markets. The move reflects broader US reshoring efforts, tighter supply-chain requirements, and rising customer interest in regulatory compliance and resilience.

Column: Beyond Zero Trust – why AI supply chain resilience needs a plan B

Jingyue Hsiao — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:20:49 GMT

Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering enterprise operations, blurring the lines between cybersecurity and supply chain management. In the AI era, Zero Trust is no longer only about who can access a system. Enterprises must also ask whom and what they depend on, how concentrated those dependencies are, and what happens when a critical link fails.

HAA free tuition enrollment draws Silicon Valley buzz

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:20:34 GMT

The Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA), a separate education company incubated by Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, has officially launched and opened applications for its first class. Based in San Francisco, the private full-time school primarily targets recent high school graduates, although students with up to one year of full-time college enrollment may apply, and aims to position itself as a "college alternative."

Taiwan PCB output hits record high on AI demand, putting NT$1 trillion year within reach

Levi Li — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:20:13 GMT

AI server, high-speed networking, and memory demand continued to lift Taiwan's PCB industry in the second quarter of 2026, boosting demand for substrates, high-layer-count boards, and HDI products. Tight supplies of advanced materials and rising raw-material costs also pushed PCB prices higher quarter by quarter.

DeepSeek paper says AI agents are learning reward hacking during training

Charlene Chen — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:19:48 GMT

DeepSeek founder Wen-Feng Liang's latest paper says AI agents are already learning to exploit system loopholes and bypass intended problem-solving methods during training, underscoring a new challenge for model development: how to stop models from taking shortcuts.

Global 2026 EV sales to grow just 6.5% as Chinese exports become primary driver

Yunnie Cheng — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:19:24 GMT

DIGITIMES Intelligence forecasts global electric vehicle (EV) sales to reach 22.34 million units in 2026, representing a modest 6.5% year-over-year increase—a sharp deceleration from the 21.8% growth rate recorded in 2025. Market momentum is pivoting away from the US and China toward Europe and emerging markets. While domestic demand in China weakens, Chinese EV exports are projected to hit approximately 5.1 million units, jumping 49% from 2025 and serving as a critical supply engine for expanding overseas markets.

Behind CoWoS (part 2): How TSMC turned a niche packaging experiment into an industry standard

Yunnie Cheng — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:18:56 GMT

As chip design enters the AI era, heterogeneous integration is driving foundry giants like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel to bring advanced front-end fab capabilities into back-end packaging. In the second part of his interview with DIGITIMES, Dr. Shin-Puu Jeng, chairman of IMAPS and a former TSMC executive, shared how TSMC transformed CoWoS from a niche lab concept into an industry standard.

Behind CoWoS (part 1)—How a 0% yield crisis led to TSMC's first advanced packaging win

Yunnie Cheng — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:18:40 GMT

In a recent interview on the DIGITIMES podcast, Dr. Shin-Puu Jeng, chairman of the International Microelectronics and Packaging Society (IMAPS) and a former longtime TSMC advanced packaging executive, reflected on the early development of CoWoS. In the first of this two-part series, Jeng details how a critical thin-interposer crisis forced TSMC and Xilinx to innovate, laying the foundation for modern advanced packaging.

Analysis: Elon Musk's AI safety push clashes with regulation

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:17:53 GMT

Global AI has entered a period of dramatic turmoil, with leading researchers warning that top labs are "gambling with our lives" and one Anthropic safety researcher saying there is more than a 10% chance AI will wipe out humanity within the next 10 years. That pressure has pushed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman into rare agreement: slow model development.

Nvidia adds a record US$150 billion to its stock buyback

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:42:33 GMT

Nvidia's board has approved an extra US$150 billion for the company's share repurchase program. That raises the total still available for buybacks to US$235 billion. The company said on September 28 that it is the largest increase to a buyback authorization in history, and it expects to spend the full amount by the end of fiscal 2028.

NXP says Singapore fab with Vanguard is its biggest investment since Freescale

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:36:20 GMT

NXP Semiconductors CEO Rafael Sotomayor said the Singapore fab NXP built with Vanguard International Semiconductor (VIS) is NXP's largest investment since it acquired Freescale in 2015. The 12-inch fab, run by the joint venture VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (VSMC), opened in Tampines, Singapore on September 28. It is now in trial production, and volume production is scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.

Column: For physical AI, maps are turning into memory

Jingyue Hsiao — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:12:17 GMT

A robot that can map a factory floor still cannot necessarily find the box it has been asked to move, or remember what it saw on its last visit. For autonomous robots, building the map is increasingly just the beginning. What comes next — searching for objects, navigating to specified locations, remembering what the robot has seen, and retrieving that information for model reasoning in complex environments — is where the new applications and challenges lie.

South Korea's HBM-linked exports surge as Taiwan, Malaysia emerge as high-value destinations

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:12:02 GMT

South Korea's exports of the customs category that carries high-bandwidth memory (HBM) are no longer a two-destination story. Unit-value data show that the chips going to Taiwan and Malaysia are worth several times more per kilogram than those shipped to Hong Kong, China, or Vietnam. That points to a two-tier trade, with premium stacked memory heading to advanced packaging lines and cheaper multichip parts going to transit hubs and lower-unit-value destinations.

Weekly news roundup: China gains ground in memory and AI hardware as supply stays tight

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:11:47 GMT

China's AI sector is shifting from catch-up to commercialization, with value concentrating in hardware bottlenecks and large platforms rather than independent model labs. Across memory, DRAM and NAND shortages, HBM reallocation and rising Chinese capacity are reshaping pricing and share gains for CXMT and YMTC. Taiwan and Singapore are extending into glass packaging, photonics and advanced packaging, while Chinese auto ambitions are stirring US backlash ahead of Xi's visit.

Apple keeps iPhone Duo in China, exposing limits of India's phone supply chain

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:51:15 GMT

Apple's first foldable iPhone has become a test of how far India has come as a manufacturing base, and the answer is sobering. As India-assembled iPhones reach record export levels, Apple kept development and assembly of its most complex phone, the iPhone Duo, in China. The decision points to a gap that Pune Times Mirror summed up this way: India has become indispensable to Apple's assembly operations, but not yet to its engineering.

Meta's Muse faces security scrutiny over macOS zero-day, human-agent test

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:51:04 GMT

Meta's Muse AI agent is facing scrutiny over the breadth of access it requires after a security researcher identified a zero-day vulnerability in its macOS version, highlighting risks that can emerge when AI agents are given extensive control over a user's device.

China's Micro Han Xin code takes aim at Data Matrix in semiconductor traceability

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:50:46 GMT

China is trying to carve out a foothold in semiconductor supply-chain standards with Micro Han Xin, a miniaturized version of its home-grown barcode designed for chips and other components too small for conventional labels.

Beyond ASML: China rethinks EUV race with light-source strategy

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:50:32 GMT

China is trying to broaden the definition of the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) race. Rather than focusing only on building a domestic equivalent to ASML's lithography platform, Chinese researchers are exploring alternative EUV light sources that could improve energy efficiency, support semiconductor metrology and eventually provide new options for advanced lithography.

India roundup: India's tech ambitions widen from electronics manufacturing to chips, cloud and talent

DIGITIMES — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:50:19 GMT

India's technology push is widening across electronics manufacturing, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and talent, as domestic expansion draws deeper investment, tighter scrutiny and stronger links with global technology supply chains worldwide.

Keysight pushes design-to-deployment standard for AI cluster validation

Lily Hess — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:23:50 GMT

As AI applications expand rapidly across industries, testing and validation have become essential to moving innovation from R&D into real-world use. Gartner's latest forecast puts global AI spending at US$2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5%, and about US$3.6 trillion in 2027.

Meta Muse fuels agentic AI demand, tightening CPU supply

Charlene Chen — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:23:16 GMT

Meta's AI assistant Muse is drawing strong market response, and the rise of agentic AI is drawing attention to AI infrastructure shortages beyond GPUs and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), including server CPUs. The trend is lifting order demand for AMD and Intel products, while also tightening the server CPU packaging supply chain.

Nvidia's push for personal AI computers points to a broader shift toward on-premise compute

Jingyue Hsiao — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:22:55 GMT

Nvidia is positioning its newest personal AI system as more than a developer tool. By putting DGX Spark on desks and, eventually, in homes, the company is signaling that the next phase of AI computing may rely less on remote data centers and more on local machines.

China wields LCD pricing power as OLED patent war with Samsung heats up

Yunnie Cheng — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:22:18 GMT

Chinese LCD panel manufacturers are issuing price adjustment notices to their clients, a move poised to increase television manufacturing costs for South Korean tech giants Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics. Following the strategic exit of South Korean display makers from TV LCD manufacturing, Chinese suppliers have solidified their dominance over the global supply chain. As a result, Chinese pricing strategies and capacity utilization plans are becoming the primary variables determining TV brand profitability.

Beijing escalates domestic chip drive with Broadcom audits

DIGITIMES — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:21:37 GMT

China is intensifying its push to replace foreign technology across critical computing infrastructure, targeting high-speed networking hardware alongside foreign AI accelerators.

South Korea's 300mm research gap: Daejeon pitches an open fab as a US$1.46 billion fix

DIGITIMES — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:21:12 GMT

Daejeon is seeking to build a roughly KRW2 trillion (approx. US$1.46 billion) national semiconductor research hub centered on an open 300mm manufacturing and demonstration fab, aiming to fill a gap between South Korea's research infrastructure and its large commercial chipmaking base.

Chinese automakers tighten control over supply chains as margins shrink

Jingyue Hsiao — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:20:38 GMT

Chinese automakers are reshaping how they build, source, and sell vehicles as profits come under pressure, a shift with implications for suppliers, buyers, and global car markets. Industry moves toward in-house technology, tighter payment rules, and new supplier roles suggest a broader effort to capture more value across the automotive chain.

US and Chinese accounts of Xi's Washington visit agree on the framework, not the fine print

DIGITIMES — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 07:41:52 GMT

Chinese President Xi Jinping's September 23-25 state visit to Washington ended without a joint statement, leaving the White House fact sheet and Beijing's official readouts as the only formal record of what was agreed. Read side by side, the two accounts converge on the architecture of the relationship and on the channels for further talks, but diverge on almost everything that could be measured: every quantified pledge appears only in the US text, while Taiwan appears only in China's.

Trump-Xi summit yields few concessions but keeps the rivals talking

DIGITIMES — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 07:36:49 GMT

Neither Washington nor Beijing gave much ground during Chinese President Xi Jinping's September 23-25 state visit, and analysts in both countries largely agree. The summit did deliver a shared commitment to keep negotiating as competition between the two powers intensifies. The truce that holds tariffs down was extended rather than rebuilt, and the hard questions were deferred to meetings later this year.

DIGITIMES Insight: China's memory makers seek scale, funding to close the gap with global leaders

Jingyue Hsiao — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 04:28:50 GMT

China's two leading memory suppliers are moving to raise capital and expand output as demand for chips grows, a shift that could reshape the country's domestic supply chain. Their efforts reflect a new stage for the sector, but the long-term test will be whether fresh funding can translate into stronger technology, higher yields, and wider customer adoption.

Interview: Taiwan's H2U helps companies manage employee health with AI, eyes third markets with South Korea

Willis Ke — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:29:08 GMT

When companies discuss ESG, they often emphasize environmental issues and compliance while paying less attention to employee health, a key component of the social dimension, according to Saxon Chen, founder and CEO of Taiwanese digital health technology company H2U Corp.

Samsung foundry recovery gains pace, but 2nm, Taylor fab remain hurdles

DIGITIMES — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:28:25 GMT

Samsung Electronics' foundry recovery is gaining pace as higher utilization, firmer pricing, and stronger advanced-node demand improve earnings, but a sustained return to profit will depend on 2nm yields and how quickly its Taylor fab in Texas ramps production.

Wi-Fi 7 drives enterprise network refresh as channel inventories normalize

DIGITIMES — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:18:09 GMT

Europe's enterprise networking market is emerging from a two-year inventory correction as Wi-Fi 7 adoption accelerates and pulls spending into campus switching, broadening what began as a wireless upgrade into a wider infrastructure refresh.

SpaceX's AI-in-space bet is worth trillions, but space data centers won't be ready until the 2030s

DIGITIMES — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:16:35 GMT

SpaceX's IPO has already put a price on "AI in space" in the capital markets. But the people actually building satellite computers describe a different timetable.

Acer, Phison split on DRAM outlook as PC memory supply eases

DIGITIMES — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:11:31 GMT

Acer and Phison Electronics are offering sharply different readings of the DRAM market as supply conditions improve for mainstream PC memory while AI and server demand keep the broader market constrained.