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Friday 15 May 2026

Broadcom loses South Korea appeal over fine for alleged coercive Samsung supply deal

Broadcom lost its appeal in South Korea on May 13, 2026, when the Seoul High Court upheld a KRW191 billion (approx. US$130 million) fine for allegedly coercing Samsung Electronics into an unfair three-year supply contract, according to Yonhap and Seoul Economic Daily. The court dismissed challenges brought by Broadcom's US headquarters and three South Korean affiliates against the Korea Fair Trade Commission's corrective order and penalty.

Friday 15 May 2026

Trump-Xi summit is Nvidia's best shot at getting back into China

US President Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week has put Nvidia's stalled H200 sales in China back in focus, as Washington's export approvals have yet to translate into revenue for the AI chipmaker.

Friday 15 May 2026

US clears Nvidia’s H200 for China, but Beijing can still say no

The US has cleared around 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence chips, but no deliveries have been made, suggesting that Washington's approval alone may not be enough to revive the company's high-end China business.

Friday 15 May 2026

Analysis: Nvidia ramped up AI investments to US$45.3 billion in 2026, reshaping AI supply chain

Nvidia expanded a rapid investment campaign in 2026, deploying US$17.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended January 25, 2026, and topping US$45.3 billion so far in 2026, according to the company's financial disclosures and PitchBook data. Executives framed the activity as targeted moves across model providers, compute and cloud firms, and hardware and optical interconnect suppliers aimed at securing end demand and reducing bottlenecks in the AI inference stack.

Friday 15 May 2026

Malaysia's Arm-backed chip push lifts Oppstar, SkyeChip as startup ambitions expand beyond packaging

Malaysia is accelerating efforts to expand beyond semiconductor assembly and testing into chip design, following a government-backed initiative tied to access to Arm technology.

Friday 15 May 2026

South Korea denies plan to share semiconductor tax windfall with citizens

A political debate in South Korea over how to manage windfall tax revenues from the country's semiconductor boom has intensified after remarks by a senior presidential aide sparked widespread controversy and conflicting media reports.

Thursday 14 May 2026

QBit Semiconductor targets edge AI growth as copier chips turn oligopolistic

IC design firm QBit Semiconductor will list on the Emerging Stock Board on May 15, 2026, and chairman Simon Shen, a former Kinpo executive, said the debut marks a new milestone for the company and underscores a promising growth outlook.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Etron's robotics bets gain ground as memory cycle turns

Etron Technology is seeing momentum extend beyond its core memory business, as subsidiaries built over the past several years begin to bear fruit in robotics, edge computing, and privacy-focused applications.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Alibaba faces mounting margin pressure as AI investments accelerate

Analysts gave Alibaba Group Holding's latest results a cautious reception, warning that surging artificial intelligence (AI) investments are pressuring profitability even as cloud growth accelerates. While investors welcomed strong AI-related momentum and rising cloud revenue, several research firms said heavy infrastructure spending and weaker-than-expected earnings underscored the mounting costs of Alibaba's ambitious AI expansion.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Tencent eyes Chinese ASIC ramp in 2H26

Tencent Holdings Limited reported a 9% year-over-year increase in total revenue to CNY196 billion (approx. US$28.86 billion) for the first quarter of 2026, driven by a strategic pivot toward artificial intelligence (AI) and stabilized growth in its core gaming and advertising segments. Company executives highlighted the quarter as a turning point, noting "significant initial progress on our new AI products" while continuing to integrate machine learning across existing business lines.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Analysis: How OpenAI is playing the Cerebras card to reshape its AI supply chain

OpenAI's deep partnership with chipmaker Cerebras has taken a public turn as Cerebras prepares to list in the US, a development that underscores OpenAI's effort to restructure its compute supply chain without abandoning existing suppliers. The listing arrives amid OpenAI's ongoing legal dispute with Elon Musk.

Thursday 14 May 2026

MediaTek courts Intel as Google pushes for alternatives to CoWoS

MediaTek's decision to pursue advanced packaging partnerships with both TSMC's CoWoS ecosystem and Intel's EMIB platform has become one of the semiconductor industry's most closely watched strategic moves.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Lam Research to hire 1,000-plus engineers in Taiwan on AI chip demand

Lam Research said it will hire more than 1,000 professional engineers in Taiwan in 2026 as customer demand mounts and the company expands technical support services for foundry, memory and assembly and test customers.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

L&T Semiconductor Technologies signs multiyear agreement with Synopsys for AI-enabled power module design

L&T Semiconductor Technologies' multiyear agreement with Synopsys to use AI-enabled multiphysics simulation software could accelerate the development of power modules and intelligent power modules, potentially affecting global electric mobility, renewable energy, and industrial automation by improving design efficiency, reliability, and time-to-market for next-generation power electronics, and by enhancing supply-chain resilience.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Malaysia explores semiconductor listings to strengthen domestic capital markets

Malaysia is exploring ways to encourage more semiconductor-related companies to list on Bursa Malaysia as the government seeks to better align the country's capital markets with its growing role in the global chip supply chain.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

China CPU vendors seize AI inference surge as Intel, AMD supplies tighten

The global race for AI computing power continues to intensify, beyond ongoing GPU shortages. CPUs, long viewed as secondary components in servers, are once again becoming critical parts of data center infrastructure due to the rapid rise of AI inference and AI agent applications.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Taiwan's semiconductor supply chain posts broadly positive April; AI demand clearly visible across ecosystem

Of the 238 Taiwan-listed semiconductor and related companies tracked by Digitimes, 73% (173 companies) posted positive year-on-year revenue growth in April 2026, and 58% (139) grew month-over-month. Memory makers, AI server assemblers, and advanced packaging houses led the advance, while silicon wafer suppliers and a handful of fabless names faced ongoing headwinds.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Moore Threads builds China-made embodied AI stack with Lightwheel.ai

Moore Threads has entered a strategic partnership with Lightwheel Intelligent (Beijing) Technology (Lightwheel.ai) to jointly develop a domestic simulation and synthetic data infrastructure platform for embodied AI, highlighting China's broader push to reduce reliance on foreign AI computing and robotics software ecosystems.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

AI server tracker: GUC surges ahead as Faraday and Alchip face slower 2026 start

Taiwan's ASIC and design services sector is showing sharply diverging fortunes in 2026, with new monthly revenue data highlighting strong momentum for GUC while rivals Faraday and Alchip face a slower start to the year.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

AI drives IC price hikes, lifts China chip exports 83.7% in April

Global investment in AI computing power is continuing to boost semiconductor demand, and China's chip exports are surging in tandem. Data from China's General Administration of Customs show that China's IC export value rose 100.1% year-over-year in April 2026, marking the first time it has doubled and reflecting how price hikes in AI servers, data centers, and memory are spreading rapidly through the IC supply chain.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Trade talks to test US-China leverage on rare earths, tariffs, and AI

US President Donald Trump is set to travel to China this week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping for trade talks. The meeting comes at a time when both powers are grappling with technological competition, trade tensions, and the Middle East conflict. Many observers are not expecting a transformative outcome, but rather a continuation of small gestures to tamp down a trade war that erupted last year.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

PC chip demand stays murky in 2H26 as pre-buying clocks key

Demand for PC, notebook, and other IT application chips in the first half of 2026 remains relatively strong, driven not only by memory and CPU shortages and price increases, but also by solid pull-in demand for peripheral chips. Many industry players say the current buying momentum is stronger than in a typical seasonal low and reflects customers' expectations that component costs will keep rising. By past patterns, inventory digestion would usually emerge in the second half, but chipmakers now cannot say for sure whether customer orders will see a major correction.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Samsung labor dispute rattles global supply chain

Samsung Electronics' escalating labor dispute has sparked global supply-chain concerns, with Apple and HP said to be warning they could exit the company's ecosystem. Suppliers, industry groups, and clients are now assessing contingency measures as mediation resumes, with potentially wide-ranging implications for production schedules, procurement stability, investor confidence, and the wider technology hardware market at large.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

WPG Holdings, WT Microelectronics see record April revenue on strong AI server demand

Leading IC distributors WPG Holdings and WT Microelectronics posted double-digit growth in both monthly and cumulative revenue for January to April 2026, driven by demand for data centers and AI-related servers.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Arm's AGI CPU demand surges as supply constraints loom

Arm is preparing to expand beyond its traditional IP licensing business by introducing data center CPUs, positioning itself to compete directly with some of its own customers, including AWS, Google, and Nvidia, while maintaining rapid growth in licensing revenue driven by rising demand for AI infrastructure.

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