Sustainability is not just good for communities and the environment but also good for business. This is the message from a sustainability summit that took place at SEMICON Taiwan this week, with water management and equipment providers seeking to link water recycling, tool upgrades, and efficiency-improving automation to measurable cost savings.
Broadcom Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Core Switching Group Asad Khamisy said at the Semicon Taiwan 2026 master forum that co-packaged optics (CPO) is not necessarily the best answer for scale-up networking, arguing that scale-out applications offer higher value and can cut power consumption by about 70% compared with pluggable optical modules.
Chinese DRAM maker CXMT has launched its 2027 global recruitment campaign, opening roles across circuit design, R&D, mass-production technology, manufacturing operations, information technology and artificial intelligence. Positions are based in Hefei, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an and overseas markets including Japan.
Zeiss is expanding its Taiwan presence as artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates demand for smaller chips, vertical stacking, and 2.5D and 3D heterogeneous integration. The shift is increasing the need for metrology, inspection, and failure analysis, and Zeiss is planning a semiconductor innovation center in northern Taiwan to support validation and application development.
Solomon Technology, a Taiwanese artificial intelligence (AI) 3D vision company, is showcasing two key inspection applications that integrate its core AI vision and optical technologies at Semicon Taiwan 2026. The applications include full-wafer warpage detection inside front-opening unified pods (FOUP)/cassettes and through-glass via (TGV) aperture defect inspection technology, aimed at preventing equipment downtime during manufacturing processes and ensuring the yield and quality of next-generation advanced packaging.
TSMC says surging AI demand is stretching the global chip industry beyond its usual planning cycle, with fast-changing procurement needs, labor shortages, and infrastructure constraints affecting markets far beyond Taiwan. The company is expanding aggressively, but executives say the pace of demand is still outrunning the ecosystem's ability to respond.
SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won has raised the possibility of jointly producing semiconductors with Japan's Kioxia, taking SK Hynix's exploration of a Japanese manufacturing base a step further by publicly identifying its NAND rival as a potential production partner.
Intel's US$23 billion equity raise in August was pre-funding for a capacity build driven by demand and process confidence rather than distress, chief financial officer David Zinsner said, committing Intel to equipping fabs in Ireland, Arizona, and Oregon before 14A reaches high-volume manufacturing in 2028. At Deutsche Bank's 2026 Technology Conference on August 27, he put numbers on the advanced packaging business, a data center CPU cycle Intel expects to undersupply into 2028, and a gross margin now "comfortably in the 40s."
MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai said Taiwan's supply-chain capabilities are unmatched as the technology industry moves into the AI and robotics era, while joking that the chip designer will need significantly more capacity in the years ahead.
For decades, semiconductor performance gains largely came from shrinking process nodes, from 22nm and 14nm to 7nm and 3nm. AI is changing the constraint: processors are getting faster, but moving enough data to feed them is increasingly difficult.
AUO Group's AET Corporation (AET), formed in September 2025 through the merger of AUO Envirotech and AUO Digitech, is expanding across the semiconductor supply chain and has reportedly entered the ecosystem of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). After the merger, AET's core operations turned profitable in 2025, and the company is targeting a full-year profit in 2026.
More coverage
