Fabless chip designers dominate the upper ranks of Taiwan's newly disclosed non-managerial employee pay data for fiscal year 2025, with only two capital-intensive manufacturers — TSMC and memory-testing equipment maker Phison — breaking into the top tier typically reserved for asset-light IC design houses.

TSMC has accelerated efforts to localize its supply chain in recent years, using joint development, joint validation, and long-term partnerships to help Taiwanese equipment, materials, and chemical suppliers enter the advanced semiconductor supply chain. The move is steadily building a more resilient and complete local supply system, with both CoWoS and panel-level advanced packaging (CoPoS) now spawning a "second fleet."

Wistron chairman Simon Lin said artificial intelligence (AI) is improving the quality of professional talent, noting that tasks that previously required 100 people may now be completed by as few as four or five. As a result, AI can help address labor shortages caused by declining birth rates, while also creating value at different levels.

Samsung Group detailed plans on July 2 to invest KRW140 trillion (US$90 billion) in display panels, batteries, chips, and chip materials in South Korea's central Chungcheong region.

Anthropic is exploring a custom AI chip and has held talks with Samsung Electronics as a potential manufacturing partner, joining OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta in the race to control AI infrastructure.

As South Korea moves to accelerate a new semiconductor cluster in the country's southwest, ruling-party officials have returned to one comparison: Kumamoto.

Samsung Electronics used its annual foundry ecosystem event on July 1 to signal that its contract chipmaking business is regaining momentum, laying out a longer-term manufacturing roadmap alongside signs of firmer near-term demand.

Fujifilm India said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Gujarat State Electronics Mission, under the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of Gujarat, to explore opportunities for manufacturing semiconductor materials in India and strengthening domestic supply chain capabilities.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled new research on a three-dimensional transistor architecture that it says could help extend logic chip scaling beyond the limits of today's semiconductor designs, as the industry searches for ways to improve performance after decades of shrinking transistor dimensions.

Taiwan plans to launch an emissions trading system (ETS) in 2028 as the next phase of its carbon pricing framework — a cap-and-trade market where companies buy and sell permits to emit greenhouse gases. However, environmental researchers and academics caution that the experiences of Japan, South Korea, and the European Union (EU) show that emissions trading markets take years to mature and operate effectively. With Taiwan's own carbon fee only recently taking effect, they argue the government should prioritize policy continuity and give businesses time to internalize carbon costs and implement decarbonization strategies before introducing a cap-and-trade regime.

As semiconductor manufacturing enters the 2nm era, conventional transistor scaling is approaching its physical limits. On June 25, 2026, IBM unveiled what it described as the world's first sub-1-nanometer chip technology, featuring a 0.7nm (7-angstrom) process node. The research chip integrates nearly 100 billion transistors into an area roughly the size of a fingernail, marking a significant milestone in semiconductor scaling.