Rising memory prices are already weighing on 2026 smartphone and notebook shipments, and sustained AI infrastructure investments are expected to keep quotes climbing into 2027. To counter softer buying interest as retail prices rise, hardware vendors like Samsung are pivoting to fresh strategies. Alongside cost controls and broader product line-ups, companies are increasingly prioritizing software differentiation, AI integration, post-purchase services, and aggressive promotion of previous-generation (N-1) models.
As AI agents integrate into enterprise operations, companies scaling deployment face rising challenges around runaway costs, permission controls, and cybersecurity governance. CloudMile founder and chairman Spencer Liu noted that many firms using AI still lack clarity on cost allocation or what data agents have accessed.
A string of AI server smuggling prosecutions is showing that following US export-control rules to the letter has not stopped advanced Nvidia hardware from reaching China. The weak point lies less in the chips themselves than in the multi-layered server supply chain that carries them, where each participant checks its own slice, and no one owns the final destination.
The global artificial intelligence landscape is witnessing an accelerating divide. While Silicon Valley grapples with escalating safety debates and regulatory friction, Chinese tech developers are rapidly deploying lightweight models and domestic chips. Simultaneously, European players are stepping up to claim AI sovereignty through open-weight models designed for critical enterprise infrastructure.
Chinese AI company Z.ai is expanding its overseas commercialisation through Amazon Bedrock, with AWS adding GLM-5.3 on October 6 and sharing revenue with Z.ai based on model usage.
SpaceX launched its Starship super heavy-lift rocket on September 28, successfully reaching orbit for the first time and deploying 26 Starlink V3 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Each Starship mission can carry up to approximately 60 Starlink V3 satellites. Although neither stage was recovered, both splashed down at sea and the satellite deployment was successful.
Taiwan's tech industry has grown rapidly in recent years on the back of strengths in semiconductors, servers and the data center supply chain, lifting overall GDP. But companies that keep chasing hardware specs or wait for technology to become perfect before deploying AI will face an endless cycle of catch-up pressure, according to former minister of science and technology Liang-Gee Chen.
Hwacom Systems has shifted its semiconductor-focused business to subsidiary SureWin, targeting growing demand from chipmakers for AI deployment, data governance, and cybersecurity, including post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is poised to raise more than CNY80 billion (approx. US$11.9 billion) in its latest funding round, as it builds capital ahead of a potential domestic initial public offering (IPO).
India is joining the top tier of Asia Pacific data center markets with a stock of facilities designed for a fraction of the power AI hardware draws. That gap is turning the country's build-out into a race for liquid cooling, power equipment, and high-density designs, not just floor space.
Huawei is backing near-packaged optics (NPO) rather than co-packaged optics (CPO) for its next-generation AI infrastructure, arguing that NPO offers a better balance of cost, manufacturability, reliability and serviceability as optical interconnects move deeper into large-scale AI clusters.
The global race to build data centers for artificial intelligence is entering a more difficult phase. Demand for computing capacity remains strong, but new projects increasingly face limits on land, electricity, water, and local acceptance, turning infrastructure expansion into a broader political and social contest.
The traditional market divide between the third-generation semiconductors gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) is seeing greater overlap in 2026, with SiC increasingly encroaching on GaN's territory.
Marvell Technology is betting that the next phase of AI infrastructure growth will require substantially more networking and optical connectivity, raising its fiscal 2028 revenue outlook to approximately US$20 billion and setting a fiscal 2031 target of US$70 billion to US$90 billion. The company's strategy centers on extending existing hyperscaler relationships across switches, optics, and custom chips surrounding AI processors.
AI server supply chains are accelerating their shift toward regional manufacturing. However, the labor access, wage costs, and capacity expansion constraints of US manufacturing are forcing manufacturers to raise automation levels to balance delivery speed and production efficiency. That has pushed Foxconn and Nvidia to jointly invest in precision assembly automation research, with an eye toward reducing manual handling.
Catcher Technology said its existing AI products continued to expand shipments as the year-end period approached, while medical and drone businesses were entering mass production. The casing maker also said additional AI server projects are scheduled to begin mass production from the first quarter of 2027, with AI PC-related products expected to follow in the second quarter of 2027.
Transcend reported a sharp recovery in September 2026 revenue as shipments for industrial PC and networking customer projects picked up. The memory module maker said monthly consolidated revenue reached NT$6.04 billion (approx. US$190 million), up 24.8% from August and 290% from a year earlier.
The excitement around massive orbital infrastructure mainly stems from its tremendous potential in offering compute nodes powered by near-continuous solar energy beyond the spatial limits of terrestrial infrastructure.
Reflection AI, the Nvidia-backed startup that has cast itself as a US counterweight to China's open-model developers, has unveiled Beam, its first open-weight model, which it says rivals leading options in the US and China while costing less than many competitors.
Cerebras' stock rebounded by 9% after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave reassurance that the two companies are close partners days after a report cast doubt on their relationship, causing the chipmaker's stock to drop 20% last week. The episode raises concerns over its current concentration on a few large customers.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company plans to further increase investment in Taiwan's semiconductor supply chain as demand for CPUs, GPUs, and AI computing continues to outpace available capacity.
As AI advances rapidly, the robotics industry is evolving from traditional automation equipment into a productivity tool for every industry, Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) said. ITRI added that robots will gradually move into manufacturing, inspection, welding, warehousing, medical care, and even homes, and that hardware, AI, sensing, and virtual-physical integration will be key to turning robots from simply machines that can move into ones that can work.
South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said its Sovereign AI Foundation Model Project will run to completion as originally planned. The statement reversed, within hours, a vice minister's suggestion that the national-team AI competition would wind down as the government launches a new KRW4.7 trillion frontier AI program.
Taiwan's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has launched two research programs targeting silicon photonics (SiPh) and next-generation AI data center power systems, seeking to address energy and performance bottlenecks as high-speed computing shifts increasingly from copper to optical interconnects.
