South Korea's labor minister met semiconductor companies on November 13 to hear how the 52-hour workweek cap affects their research and development staff, as unions, employers, and the government remain split over exempting workers in planned super-regional special zones from the limit.

Samsung Electronics has reportedly secured new AI chip manufacturing orders from major US cloud service providers for a second consecutive quarter, with commercial shipments expected to begin in 2028 as tight capacity at TSMC creates opportunities for Samsung's foundry business.

Intel is courting South Korea's AI ecosystem on two fronts: a 23-company alliance built around Korean-made servers and an inference GPU that swaps costly high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for low-power DRAM. At the 2026 Intel AI Summit Seoul, held at COEX on November 12, the US chipmaker also offered its custom chip design and foundry services to a market crowded with neural processing unit (NPU) startups and home to two of the world's largest memory makers.

The battle for control of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia is intensifying after a Dutch court further restricted Chinese parent Wingtech Technology and related parties from interfering with the company's operations. Meanwhile, Nexperia China is accelerating efforts to establish an independent supply chain, deepening the divide between the two sides' management and manufacturing operations.

Special Melted Products, a UK subsidiary of Taiwan-based wire, cable, and stainless steel manufacturer Walsin Lihwa, is partnering with National Taiwan University (NTU) and the University of Sheffield to establish an advanced international research center. The initiative will combine Sheffield's traditional steelmaking base with strengths in heterogeneous integration and compound semiconductors, targeting the aerospace and defense industries as key commercial outlets.

For generations, Sheffield's industrial identity has been forged in steel. Yet behind that familiar legacy, a less visible technological transformation has been unfolding for decades.

Imagine a maintenance robot operating inside a fusion reactor, exposed to temperatures reaching 600 degrees Celsius and intense radiation, with an expected service life of 25 years. Developing electronics capable of surviving such conditions would be an extraordinary engineering achievement. But manufacturing the chips is only half the problem.

Inside a refurbished industrial building in Sheffield, a quantum computing laboratory is preparing for a future that could transform how the world develops medicines, advanced materials, and computing infrastructure.

In a business incubator at County Durham's NETPark, the future of Britain's semiconductor industry was being discussed by people whose technologies rarely feature in global chipmaking headlines. Some develop radiation detectors for medical imaging; others design high-frequency chips for aerospace systems or electronics capable of surviving conditions where conventional silicon fails.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) expects artificial intelligence (AI) demand to keep chip supply tight through mid-2028, even as equipment lead times of up to two years slow its own capacity build-out, executives said on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call.

Applied Materials' record fourth-quarter revenue and operating income highlight how investment in AI infrastructure is translating into demand for wafer-fabrication equipment. Growth was led by equipment for advanced logic and memory, while a strong first-quarter outlook and management's projection for a rapidly expanding equipment market point to continued investment. Supply-chain and fab capacity will determine how quickly that demand becomes shipments.

A dispute between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over how hard to police Nvidia chip shipments to China has moved to the center of Washington's fallout from espionage allegations involving Nvidia's former CEO, with White House officials discussing whether Lutnick should be pushed out and lawmakers pressing his department to add Chinese firms that have been left alone to its Entity List.

SMIC's record third-quarter revenue and sharper rise in operating profit point to stronger factory throughput, while the lower net result against the prior quarter shows how investment-related income can obscure the underlying manufacturing trend. The company expects sales to keep growing in the fourth quarter, but its margin guidance signals that the exceptional third-quarter level may not hold.

Samsung Electronics is targeting an exit from its 8-inch foundry business by the end of 2029, a year earlier than previously reported, and has been outsourcing some production to Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), South Korea's Dealsite reported on November 12, citing industry sources.

Foxconn reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of more than NT$3 trillion (US$91 billion) and raised its full-year outlook, while taking a "cautiously optimistic" view of 2027 and forecasting high-double-digit growth in AI rack shipments. The company expects to gain market share through diversified AI solutions and an expanding customer base, but warned that component supplies, geopolitical and economic conditions, inflation, and monetary policy will shape its 2027 operations.

Tata Electronics is lining up fresh debt at a moment when nearly every leg of its expansion has run into friction: a flagship chip fab whose production start has moved from the end of 2026 to mid-2028 and will launch on an older process, losses that widened even as revenue doubled, and a run of incidents at its iPhone component plant in Tamil Nadu.

Samsung Electronics said on November 12 it had moved up the planned opening of its new high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging plant in South Korea by one year to June 2028 to meet rising demand for AI server memory.

DB HiTek's third-quarter 2026 results point to continued strength in its core foundry operations, even as a steep decline in net income shows that operating momentum did not carry through to the bottom line. The South Korean chipmaker said demand for power semiconductors kept utilization at virtually full levels, while a richer mix of high-voltage products supported selling prices. It is now preparing to add capacity, though the ramp will depend on customer demand and investment decisions.

Mitsubishi Gas Chemical (MGC) announced on November 10 that it will expand manufacturing and shipment-inspection equipment at its Thailand subsidiary to increase capacity for BT (Bismaleimide-Triazine) laminates used in semiconductor packaging. The new line is scheduled to begin construction in April 2027 and start operations in October 2028, targeting growing demand from data centers, servers and high-density IC substrates.

A semiconductor chip no thicker than a fraction of a human hair might seem insignificant beside the powerful silicon processors driving the world's AI revolution. Yet at Pragmatic Park in North East England, these tiny, flexible devices represent a different vision of computing: one where intelligence gradually becomes embedded in the objects people touch, wear, and use every day.

Faced with sluggish end-user demand, chronic overcapacity, and intensifying market competition, global display manufacturers are under pressure to reinvent themselves. In Taiwan, leading panel makers are accelerating asset optimization and cross-domain technology integration to unlock new growth drivers.

TSMC is facing unprecedented demand for its advanced chips as artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure investment accelerates, with advanced packaging and emerging physical AI applications expected to create additional growth opportunities, according to company executives.

Demand for AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and semiconductors continued to rise, driving Wah Lee Industrial's 3Q26 profit to record-high levels. Gross profit reached NT$2.06 billion (US$62.7 million), up 28.7% year-on-year, while earnings per share (EPS) reached NT$3.46; cumulative EPS for the first three quarters rose to NT$9.4, also a record for the period.

Samsung Electronics and AMD are teaming up to upgrade the Korean chipmaker's semiconductor manufacturing test infrastructure, combining AMD's new EPYC Embedded 9006 processors with Samsung memory and storage technologies, according to AMD's November 10 announcement.

US silicon carbide (SiC) giant Wolfspeed will re-enter the gallium nitride (GaN) market through a vertically integrated model and expand into the GaN-on-silicon (GaN-on-Si) power device market, according to company CEO Robert Feurle. The announcement, made at a media event during the Electronica 2026 trade fair in Munich, Germany, stated that the company will initially target low-voltage applications below 650V.