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Jul 8, 16:37
TSMC earnings call could signal how long the AI boom can keep lifting its outlook

TSMC's July 16 earnings call is likely to test how far the chipmaker can extend its already upbeat guidance, as investors look for signs that AI demand, flagship smartphone launches, and broader wafer orders can offset inflation, materials shortages, and mounting manufacturing complexity. The market is watching for another upgrade to revenue, spending, and margin targets.

Heads of venture capital associations from Taiwan, Japan, and Korea gathered in Taipei today for the first Asia Venture Capital (VC) Summit, a historic trilateral meeting aimed at deepening cross-border investment as AI reshapes the region's tech landscape.
Novatek reported June revenue of NT$10.023 billion, up 6.48% from the previous month and 18.96% from a year earlier, pushing second-quarter revenue to NT$28.66 billion. The chip designer's second-quarter result rose 24% quarter over quarter and 9.59% year over year, topping its earlier forecast of NT$27.5 billion to NT$28.5 billion.
ELAN reported June 2026 revenue of NT$1.059 billion, up 5.48% from the prior month and 7.13% from a year earlier. The Taiwanese chip maker said second-quarter 2026 revenue reached NT$3.368 billion, up 4.4% quarter-over-quarter and 11.1% year-over-year, while first-half revenue totaled NT$5.37 billion, a 4.04% increase from a year earlier.

France's push into Taiwan's tech ecosystem has entered a new phase. After three years of cultural outreach and research exchanges, cooperation is now showing up in steel, silicon, and server racks. Foxconn, SiPearl, and a growing list of AI data center projects are turning bilateral goodwill into industrial output.

The Netherlands used a trade mission to Beijing this week to reopen economic ties with China while semiconductor tensions remained at the center of the agenda. Dutch trade officials met Chinese counterparts as Amsterdam sought to manage disputes involving Nexperia and ASML amid broader US-China technology restrictions.
As AI infrastructure chip orders flood in and TSMC runs near nonstop, academia has found it difficult to carry out industry-academia collaboration with the world's top foundry house. Taiwan's government-funded research institutes, including the National Institutes of Applied Research (NIAR) and Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), are emerging as a better route for partnerships.

Samsung Electronics has started mass production of its PM1763 enterprise SSD, a PCIe 6.0-based drive built for AI infrastructure and slated for Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, expanding the company's AI memory strategy beyond HBM into high-performance server storage.

As AI workloads pivot toward emerging needs for systems that can perform tasks with a coordinated balance between speed and control, the hardware race is moving beyond GPUs. While the critical role GPUs have played across the AI compute landscape is not in doubt, the expansion of inference, reasoning, and agentic AI is placing CPUs back at the center of the AI hardware race.

AI servers are tightening Taiwan's power component supply chain, lifting demand for MOSFETs, PMICs, cooling motors and power management products even as weak PC demand limits suppliers' ability to pass on higher costs.

A Chinese research team has developed a phase-change memristor-based neural dynamical system chip, offering a potential hardware path for real-time brain modeling, brain-computer interfaces, and brain disease diagnosis.

South Korean equipment maker Hanmi Semiconductor is moving beyond high-bandwidth memory (HBM) tools into advanced chip packaging, a shift that could affect the global semiconductor supply chain. As ASE boosts capacity to meet TSMC-linked demand, Hanmi is positioning for broader sales growth in the second half of 2026 and beyond.