CONNECT WITH US
Thursday 1 October 2026
Qualcomm, Samsung redesign chip packaging as heat limits phone performance
Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics are redesigning how memory is packaged with flagship smartphone processors, as rising chip performance puts greater pressure on the limited cooling capacity of mobile devices.
Thursday 1 October 2026
Synopsys raises long-term growth and margin targets, guides fiscal 2027 revenue to US$11.15 billion
Synopsys is betting that custom silicon and AI-driven chip design will lift its growth above the double-digit pace it previously targeted. At its investor day in New York on September 30, 2026, the design software and IP company raised its long-term revenue goal to mid-teens annual growth through fiscal 2030, lifted its operating margin objective to about 50%, and issued fiscal 2027 guidance roughly two and a half months earlier than usual, anchored by a US$1 billion IP license with Amazon and a new model partnership with OpenAI.
Thursday 1 October 2026
AWS Trainium 3 shipments stall as supply chain sees turnaround
AWS's latest Trainium 3 shipments appear to be running behind expectations, but the strain reflects broader pressures that global readers will recognize across the AI hardware supply chain. Suppliers cited parts shortages, assembly complexity, and rapid demand growthas the main bottlenecks, which could affect cloud costs, capacity, and competition worldwide.
Thursday 1 October 2026
Synopsys and OpenAI to share revenue from AI model built to run chip design tools
Synopsys is betting that the surest way to keep generative AI from eroding its electronic design automation (EDA) franchise is to build the model together with the AI developer and share the proceeds. The chip design software maker said on September 30, 2026, that it has signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI to jointly develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized model optimized to operate Synopsys' EDA tools, under an arrangement that Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi told Reuters was structured so that "it will not be cannibalizing our business."
Thursday 1 October 2026
Jensen Huang wins Van Fleet Award as Nvidia, South Korea trio reunites
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the Korea Society's annual dinner in New York on September 28 local time and received the 2026 Van Fleet Award, with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won on hand to congratulate him. The appearance underscored how Nvidia's ties with South Korea's semiconductor makers have expanded from memory supply into AI manufacturing, creating a two-way relationship in products and technology.
Thursday 1 October 2026
Qualcomm says PC chip shortages are manageable; price swings hit harder
Qualcomm's senior vice president and general manager of the compute and gaming business, Kedar Kondap, said the biggest challenge facing the PC industry is not component shortages, but the unusually large price swings in memory and other parts. Speaking to the media during Snapdragon Summit 2026, he said that volatility is affecting the PC market.
Thursday 1 October 2026
ASIC shipments top GPUs in 2027 as ABF substrate bottlenecks shift
The high-end cloud AI accelerator market will see a structural shift in 2027, with total ASIC shipments surpassing GPU shipments for the first time, driven by rising output from Google, Amazon, and Huawei. The market will move into a landscape of "dual competition between Nvidia and Google, with multiple players racing to catch up."
Wednesday 30 September 2026
ASE Technology buys Singapore factory for AI chip testing expansion
ASE Technology Holding's Singapore unit has approved the purchase of a factory in Yishun Industrial Park from Dutch LED maker Lumileds Singapore for about US$68.44 million, or about NT$2.152 billion. The site is intended to support future capacity expansion.
Wednesday 30 September 2026
Jensen Huang, Lisa Su join Tsinghua University advisory board, putting AI chip leaders closer to Beijing

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su have joined the advisory board of Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management (SEM), putting two of the global AI chip industry's most prominent executives on the Beijing-based body.

Wednesday 30 September 2026
DeepSeek brings software tools to Huawei's Ascend 950 to take on Nvidia
DeepSeek is bringing more of the software used to develop its AI models to Huawei Technologies' Ascend 950 processors, deepening cooperation as Chinese technology companies seek to reduce reliance on Nvidia's hardware and CUDA software ecosystem.
Wednesday 30 September 2026
AMD's Lisa Su reportedly revisiting South Korea in October to deepen HBM4, NPU ties
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su is reportedly set to visit South Korea again in October 2026, after her March 2026 trip, which formally launched next-generation AI memory cooperation with Samsung Electronics. The planned visit is expected to broaden that push, with meetings lined up with South Korean AI chip companies and government officials as AMD deepens its AI semiconductor alliance in the country.
Wednesday 30 September 2026
Broadcom-Toppan venture opens Singapore's first high-end FC-BGA substrate plant
Advanced Substrate Technologies (AST), a joint venture between Japan's Toppan Holdings and Broadcom, officially opened a manufacturing facility in Singapore on September 29, 2026, the first in the country capable of producing high-end flip chip ball grid array (FC-BGA) substrates. The approximately 95,000-square-meter plant in the Jurong Lake District is the Toppan Group's first such facility outside Japan and is targeting the start of high-value manufacturing by late 2026, the companies said.
Wednesday 30 September 2026
Meta reaches agreements with Firmus on securing AI compute in Southeast Asia
Meta reached several agreements to source AI compute capacity from Firmus, an Australian neocloud, which will lease GPU compute capacity at its AI factories in Southeast Asia. The deal is said to support Meta's AI expansion across the Asia-Pacific region, while Firmus notches another order from a major customer in the run-up to a potential public listing.
Tuesday 29 September 2026
Column: Why Micron's US$250M venture fund is about more than HBM margins—Taiwan has a stake in it
Micron unveiled the Micron Ventures Paradigm Fund, a US$250 million venture vehicle, in mid-August 2026, as the memory maker pairs more than US$25 billion in fiscal 2026 capex with a pledge to invest more than US$250 billion in the US by 2035. The fund is designed to give Micron an early look at technology shifts, position it for next-generation AI architectures, and strengthen its strategy to reduce memory-cycle volatility.
Tuesday 29 September 2026
Samsung bonus plan to lift South Korea talent race

Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions division is set to announce the calculation and payout rules for its special management performance bonus in late September, after a holiday break. The move comes as SK Hynix continues recruiting experienced talent, underscoring how pay systems and workplace conditions have become key to attracting and retaining workers at South Korea's semiconductor giants.

Tuesday 29 September 2026
GF's MIPS bets on RISC-V physical AI, expands into autos and data centers
MIPS, a GlobalFoundries (GF) unit, said it has completed its integration with the ARC unit acquired from Synopsys earlier this year and is using the move to position RISC-V for physical AI, while expanding from AIoT into automotive and data center applications. MIPS said the strategy lowers the barrier for global customers to adopt GF platforms across process technologies and has pushed GF and MIPS to become the world's second-largest processor IP provider.
Tuesday 29 September 2026
Chips make up nearly half of South Korea's September exports; China, Hong Kong account for 52% of them
Semiconductors made up nearly half of South Korea's exports in the first 20 days of September, while China and Hong Kong combined accounted for more than half of the country's chip shipments in August, underscoring the growing concentration of the latest export surge by both product and destination.
Tuesday 29 September 2026
Trump-Xi state dinner puts tech titans at the head table, spotlighting Taiwan's quiet supply chain clout

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan, arrived at the White House on the evening of September 24 US time to attend a state dinner hosted by US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump.

Tuesday 29 September 2026
AMD pays US$8.2 billion for Fei-Fei Li's 3D world-modeling startup to shape future AI chips
AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI research startup led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about US$8.2 billion. The chipmaker says it wants the startup's model expertise to shape its future hardware, software and systems.
Monday 28 September 2026
Nvidia adds a record US$150 billion to its stock buyback
Nvidia's board has approved an extra US$150 billion for the company's share repurchase program. That raises the total still available for buybacks to US$235 billion. The company said on September 28 that it is the largest increase to a buyback authorization in history, and it expects to spend the full amount by the end of fiscal 2028.
Sunday 27 September 2026
Keysight pushes design-to-deployment standard for AI cluster validation

As AI applications expand rapidly across industries, testing and validation have become essential to moving innovation from R&D into real-world use. Gartner's latest forecast puts global AI spending at US$2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5%, and about US$3.6 trillion in 2027.

Sunday 27 September 2026
Beijing escalates domestic chip drive with Broadcom audits

China is intensifying its push to replace foreign technology across critical computing infrastructure, targeting high-speed networking hardware alongside foreign AI accelerators.

Friday 25 September 2026
Interview: Intel director talks physical AI, business models, and robotics' future
Physical AI is accelerating like never before. Autonomous intelligent machines can walk, run, fly, swim, and assemble car parts in under a minute. New advances in AI models and technologies like dexterous hands are also pushing the boundaries of how smart and useful humanoids can be.
Friday 25 September 2026
From ISM 1.0 to Semicon 2.0—India's chip subsidy overhaul draws early interest, raises the bar for investors
India's new semiconductor incentive regime is putting more capital at risk for manufacturers, but the first wave of investment commitments suggests lower subsidies have not stopped companies from considering fresh projects.
Thursday 24 September 2026
LG sharpens focus on data centers, robotics, chip materials

LG Group is sharpening its focus on data centers, robotics, semiconductor materials, and enterprise AI as the South Korean conglomerate refines how it allocates capital across businesses moving toward commercialization at different speeds.