India's electronics and AI infrastructure ambitions are accelerating, but mounting environmental opposition, tighter Chinese visa curbs, and intensifying competition for semiconductor investment are exposing new challenges. As Google advances a US$15 billion AI data center, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) restructures its cloud business, and Dixon Technologies expands its smartphone OEM business, states are sweetening incentives to strengthen India's position in global technology supply chains.
Taiwanese IC design firms that have been building out AI vision sensing businesses are now reaping the rewards, with major players including display driver IC (DDI) leader Novatek Microelectronics, Himax Technologies, and Realtek Semiconductor, as well as PixArt Imaging and Elan Microelectronics, saying that revenue in this area is rising quickly. The companies see AI vision sensing as set to become a key part of their overall revenue mix.
Japan's Toppan is negotiating price increases for FC-BGA substrates with customers as its new FC-BGA substrate plant ramps up, lifting the operating margin of its electronics business and doubling consolidated net profit. Nikkei Asia reported that the additional production line at Toppan's FC-BGA substrate factory in Niigata, Japan, began operations in January 2026, doubling the plant's FC-BGA substrate capacity from the first half of fiscal 2022 (April-September 2022).
As the global AI computing infrastructure boom drives rapid demand growth for GPUs, CPUs, and ASICs, the ABF substrate industry is set to swing into shortage in 2026, with the supply-demand gap expected to widen in 2027-2028. That has lifted order visibility for IC substrate makers in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, with the outlook now stretching as far as 2029-2030. Companies including Ibiden, Unimicron, Kinsus, Nan Ya Printed Circuit Board, Leading, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics are all moving into a new round of capacity expansion.
Sigurd Microelectronics, an IC testing and packaging company, reported record July 2026 revenue and said demand from AI and AI connectivity markets drove the result. The company said orders for high-performance computing chips, including CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, and AI accelerators, lifted testing demand for silicon photonics, high-speed networking, memory, silicon capacitors, baseboard management controller chips, and high-end power management ICs used in AI servers and data centers.
South Korea's semiconductor talent shortage is intensifying as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix recruit experienced chip designers for increasingly complex HBM4 products, drawing key engineers away from fabless companies and design houses while tighter restrictions complicate movement between the country's two memory giants.
Nan Pao Resins Chemical reported record second-quarter net profit attributable to the parent company of NT$877 million, with earnings per share of NT$7.27, as the Taiwan-based materials maker also said July revenue reached an all-time monthly high. The results reflected stronger sales of adhesives and building materials, along with customers placing orders early and building inventory ahead of anticipated price increases.
As AI chip value and integration complexity keep rising, King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) President Gauss Chang said semiconductor testing is shifting from being considered "part of the supply chain" to a "part of the process." He said the supply chain is also moving toward a new collaboration model built around four integrated elements: equipment, accessories, testing, and products.
AI is sharply increasing demand for test and measurement equipment, turning it from a cost-cutting support tool into a must-have, said Chroma president I-Shih Tseng. He said he expects the industry boom to outlast a short-term investment wave and that second-half 2026 operations will outperform the first half of the year.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM), a core component in AI semiconductors, has drawn fresh scrutiny after former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called it "lousy" at a recent AI summit in Paris. SK Hynix, the market leader in this type of memory, also said it is not the final answer to AI memory bottlenecks, underscoring the industry's push to find a next-generation memory architecture beyond HBM.
Ken Phua, former Arm China co-CEO, spent 25 years abroad building someone else's business model. He came home to Singapore to build his own.
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