As chip processes move to 2nm and advanced packaging accelerates heterogeneous integration, semiconductor materials are shifting from a supporting role in the supply chain to a critical factor in technological breakthroughs. SEMI has announced the formation of the "SEMI Semiconductor Materials Alliance," bringing together 35 materials, equipment, wafer fabrication, packaging, and testing companies, as well as industry, government, academia, and research organizations, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), ASE, and Micron Technology, to speed material validation for emerging technologies such as co-packaged optics (CPO) and panel-level packaging (PLP), with the goal of accelerating mass production.
Humanoid robots have entered a clear new phase since agentic AI emerged in 2025, with DIGITIMES analyst Zouhao Shen saying the category is now moving toward a three-tier hardware architecture of the brain, cerebellum, and peripheral nerves. He said the shift is reshaping the market and setting the stage for rapid growth through 2030.
The inference economy has arrived, and Taiwan's tech industry must transition from the "knowledge economy" to the "inference economy," DIGITIMES chairman Colley Hwang said on August 20 at a forum exploring future trends in the semiconductor industry. He also warned that Taiwan's AI data center capacity is about one-sixth of South Korea's.
Taiwan-based IC distributor WPG Holdings expects AI-driven semiconductor demand to remain strong into 2027, with capacity tight across both advanced and mature process nodes, even as rising memory prices weigh on smartphone and PC shipments.
Taiwanese IC design house Sunplus Technology expects its automotive orders to strengthen further in the third quarter of 2026, but warned that rising memory and component costs could weigh on overall market demand and dampen customers' willingness to place orders.
The global semiconductor ecosystem is facing an unprecedented shortage of memory chips, with hardware growth increasingly constrained by memory availability. At the same time, capacity at the world's leading advanced chipmakers has been fully booked, turning packaging capacity and memory allocation into major challenges for the broader AI market.
