Taiwanese companies are only at the start of a broader overseas investment cycle, as Washington signals possible new semiconductor tariffs and Taipei moves to deepen industrial links with Europe, Japan, and ASEAN. Officials say the island's chipmakers are responding to pressure from the US, while also broadening their global strategy to reduce risk and strengthen supply chains.

SK Hynix is accelerating its shift to sixth-generation 10nm-class 1c DRAM, with the process expected to account for roughly 34% of its DRAM production by the fourth quarter as the company prepares for HBM4E and seeks greater cost efficiency.

China's Naura Technology has demonstrated a selective etching process for 64-layer 3D DRAM structures, potentially giving domestic memory makers another route to raise transistor density while access to advanced EUV lithography remains restricted.

JM-Applied, a Taiwanese semiconductor gas equipment manufacturer and supply chain member for Micron and TSMC, said on September 4 that revenue in the first half of 2026 exceeded NT$600 million (approx. US$18.98 million), up more than 50% year-over-year. Growth was driven by the continued demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), which is driving global semiconductor expansion and boosting demand for gas supply systems and equipment at wafer fabs.

India is selling its semiconductor build-out abroad as a hedge against an over-concentrated supply chain. The officials running it are unusually candid that the hedge cannot be built without the country it hedges against. Asked at a media briefing in Taipei on 4 September how New Delhi views the role of Chinese companies in India's chip and electronics supply chain, S. Krishnan, secretary of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, opened with a line that would be politically awkward in most capitals: "We need to be realistic."

Huawei is using measured data from its upcoming Kirin 2026 processor to challenge a key concern around vertically stacked logic: that higher transistor density inevitably brings more heat.

AI infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains led reader interest this week, from Taiwan's manufacturing recovery and Nexperia's legal battle to Sandisk's HBF, Micron's HBM expansion, and Marvell's silicon photonics roadmap. Samsung also refreshed its smartphone lineup with the Galaxy S26 FE. Below are the most-read DIGITIMES stories from the week of August 31-September 06, 2026.

Wah Lee Industrial expects growth to accelerate in 2027 as advanced packaging capacity comes online and foundries continue building overseas fabs, while tight supplies of semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment are likely to keep pricing elevated.

Revenue rose at every Chinese chip company examined in the first half of 2026 amid the domestic-substitution push, but the interim filings show three quite different businesses hiding under one label. One has reached real scale and is now funding its expansion from the balance sheet rather than from operations. One is repairing its margins on a genuinely homegrown instruction set at a fraction of the scale. And the cohort's most spectacular profit number is not a processor story at all.

As the world's most powerful enterprise data centers undergo a massive migration to liquid cooling to support high-power artificial intelligence processors, a Silicon Valley chipmaker is warning of a growing class of "thermal orphans"—localized, low-power components that are left out in the cold.