Reports indicate AMD CEO Lisa Su will visit South Korea in the coming days to discuss cooperation with Samsung Electronics and Naver. Some observers view the trip as an effort to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI market by strengthening AMD's partnerships with South Korean companies.
IBM and Lam Research have announced a five-year collaboration to develop materials, manufacturing processes, and High-NA EUV lithography technologies for sub-1nm logic scaling. The agreement expands a long-standing partnership aimed at establishing viable manufacturing paths for future logic chips.
India's plan to bring four semiconductor facilities into commercial production in 2026 marks an important milestone for the country's semiconductor ambitions, but analysts say the move will have only a limited impact on global chip manufacturing capacity.
Given the global chip war and US-China rivalry, ASE Technology Holding COO Tien Wu says that in an era where AI is driving transformation in the technology industry, the new bottleneck in hardware is now in Taiwan's hands. Taiwan should use this as leverage rather than as a tool to monopolize the semiconductor industry, allowing it to pursue mutually beneficial coexistence with supply chain partners and customers while maintaining a leading position in the global AI race.
The global semiconductor industry is set to hit US$1 trillion ahead of schedule. ASE Technology Holding COO Dr. Tien Wu revealed that the latest forecast from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) indicates the industry's output, originally expected to reach US$1 trillion in 2029, could achieve the milestone as early as 2026, three to four years earlier than previously projected.
At Embedded World 2026, MediaTek unveiled the Genio Pro series, its flagship IoT platform built on TSMC's 3nm process, and said the market now requires both power-efficient mid-to-low-end chips and high-performance devices for complex real-world computations.
China's largest contract chipmaker, SMIC, says orders for mature-node memory and BCD processes are running at full capacity, pushing prices higher as AI demand tightens supply across the semiconductor industry.
The US-Iran military clash has raised concerns about oil supply disruptions and economic fallout. Still, hopes of a quick de-escalation have helped oil prices retreat and capital markets refocus on AI development. US President Donald Trump predicted the conflict would ease by the end of March, shifting market sentiment.
Iran's air defense shortcomings amid persistent US and Israeli strikes underscore the growing importance of high-power radar components and the supply chains that provide them. South Korea's Sky Bow 2 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has reportedly intercepted multiple Iranian missiles at an over 90% success rate, highlighting capability disparities.
Nvidia and Nebius Group announced a strategic partnership to develop and deploy a next-generation hyperscale cloud for the AI market, designed to serve both AI-native and enterprise customers. As part of the agreement, Nvidia will invest US$2 billion in Nebius, a move Nvidia said reflects confidence in Nebius's business and engineering expertise across the full AI technology stack.
Daxin, a key player in semiconductor materials, has seen rapid growth in recent years. Currently, wafer process materials account for a larger share of revenue than advanced packaging materials, and both segments are expected to continue expanding.
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