A sharp sell-off across artificial intelligence infrastructure stocks has turned a quiet worry about debt into a main concern for Wall Street. The sudden drop in stock and bond prices for CoreWeave, a fast-growing cloud provider backed by Nvidia, has raised questions about whether the heavy borrowing used to fund the AI expansion is becoming too risky.

Strong global demand for AI infrastructure hardware is prompting buyers to secure capacity through advance payments and long-term contracts, driving Taiwan's semiconductor, packaging and testing, memory, substrate, and equipment supply chains to expand aggressively. Private investment in Taiwan is projected to reach a record NT$6.9539 trillion (US$215.4 billion) in 2026 as companies build factories, purchase equipment, import raw materials, and hire workers to meet customer demand.

At SEMICON West 2026, US officials and lawmakers promoted domestic manufacturing and AI export policies, while industry executives warned that supplier shortages, the premium for US-made products, and export controls could undermine the country's semiconductor ambitions.

Meta on Thursday released the weights of Muse Spark Open, which it calls the most capable US open-weight model to date. The company said the multimodal model has 816 billion total parameters (42 billion active) and a one-million-token context window, and is built for coding and agentic work. Meta said the weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face, Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. It also said the model received extra safety post-training and met the thresholds of its internal risk framework.

As GenAI accelerates, e-commerce is shifting from traditional traffic management toward AI-assisted shopping and intelligent operations. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce platform Shopline said its gross merchandise value (GMV) grew 20% in 2026 from 2025, 2.5 times the market average, highlighting strong performance amid intense retail competition.

As interest rates fluctuate, bond yields rise, and Chinese AI models intensify competition, market attention is shifting from technological development and infrastructure expansion to investment returns and long-term debt-servicing capacity. The AI industry continues to attract capital but must also prove that its business models can generate profits.

The focus of the global AI race has shifted from securing advanced chips to securing access to electricity, with electrical power now becoming the deciding factor for computing capacity. As power consumption surges at AI data centers (AIDCs), conventional public grids are increasingly facing bottlenecks, and self-generation and improved grid resilience are now requirements in major data center construction projects worldwide.

Investment in AI data centers remains strong, but semiconductor growth is becoming increasingly concentrated in cloud AI, while the long-running decline in consumer technology prices has come to an abrupt halt. At a SEMICON West 2026 industry outlook session, Duncan Meldrum, an economist at Hilltop Economics, warned that the shift is putting additional pressure on the broader semiconductor market.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) is seeing rising demand for CPUs related to agentic artificial intelligence (AI), but has not yet included CPUs in its calculations of AI accelerator demand growth. TSMC chairman C.C. Wei said at the company's earnings conference on October 15 that the company is maintaining its original, narrower definition of AI demand, mainly because it is difficult to clearly distinguish whether CPUs are used in traditional servers or AI servers. Actual demand also depends on how customers deploy the technology and configure their products.

As artificial intelligence increasingly blurs the boundary between the digital and physical worlds, complications associated with real-world deployment — particularly the extreme variability of physical environments — are emerging as a subtler configuration challenge in the industry spotlight.

As Manus, one of China's more distinctive AI startups, became entangled in the high-profile unwinding of its acquisition by Meta, the startup's failed attempt to capture opportunities beyond China left the industry speculating about its next steps after an abrupt regulatory reversal.

AI is clearly making an enormous impact on the global economy, with capabilities extending from language chatbots to agentic teams and the physical realm within just a few years. A new report by consulting firm Bain takes stock of AI's effects on businesses so far and projects how it could shape the near future.

LINE Taiwan marked its 15th year in the market with a strategy shift that signals broader ambitions beyond messaging. The company is expanding into AI-powered daily services, aiming to connect users, brands, and merchants through agentic AI tools, while also strengthening account security and anti-fraud defenses.

Qualcomm has historically provided standard chips primarily through its Snapdragon product line, serving a broad range of end customers. After officially launching its Dragonfly data center product line in June 2026, the company expanded its business to include multiple hyperscalers.

Anthropic plans to place new data centers in Australia away from densely populated areas, using renewable energy and previously developed sites to reduce conflicts with residents. The US artificial intelligence company is evaluating proposals from state and local governments competing for its investment, while expanding computing capacity in the country.

Japan Mobility Show Bizweek 2026 showcased Physical AI applications, including Toyota's basketball-playing robot and an air-ground inspection system, as automakers and startups explored new business opportunities beyond traditional vehicles. The business-focused exhibition, held in Japan, sought to demonstrate how robotics, artificial intelligence and mobility technologies could address industrial challenges through collaboration across sectors.

Apple's trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI went to a hearing, where OpenAI pledged not to use confidential information that Apple claims was stolen. OpenAI also accused a former employee of taking more than 100 documents related to unreleased products when joining Apple.

An international AI research team has detected a fleet of more than a dozen AI agents operating in a suspected Tencent Cloud infrastructure sandbox and repeatedly attempting to penetrate Amap, the mapping service owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Taiwan's connector and server-chassis suppliers posted broadly higher September revenue, although their growth trajectories differed. Seven of eight tracked companies recorded annual gains for both September and January–September 2026. BizLink, AIC and Chenbro had already exceeded their full-year 2025 revenue, while Argosy remained below last year's levels.

Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson said customer demand to produce more good dies per wafer and rapidly expand wafer output has reached levels unprecedented in his career, driven by the rise of AI computing. Speaking at a global investor conference, he said the company expects revenue from related businesses to grow by more than 20% over the next several years.

The rapid expansion of AI data centers in the US is placing growing pressure on conventional power grids, as their substantial and highly variable electricity requirements strain available supply in certain regions. Power shortages have even delayed the construction of some AI data center projects.

Anthropic's third-quarter revenue surged 45% from the previous quarter and has been profitable on an adjusted basis for the last two quarters, the AI lab told prospective investors. As the company nears a record-setting IPO, it is also serving as a gauge of whether the frontier lab business model of heavy compute spending preceding profitability can be successful.

Apple launched the HomeView smart display at its "Welcome Home" event on October 13, priced at US$299. It's scheduled to debut in eight countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, and South Africa, on November 13. Featuring a 7-inch square display and an A18 chip, the device comes in desktop and wall-mounted versions and centers on a new Siri AI that Apple positions as a smart voice-control hub for the home.

Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi said that fully autonomous chip development has not yet crossed the final hurdle to become reality, although the company has advanced from AI-assisted engineering to models that coordinate more than 40 task agents. He made these comments during the CEO Summit at SEMICON West 2026, adding that AI-era chip development requires co-optimization across physics, materials, processes, architectures, software, and models.

Taiwan Perovskite Solar Corp. (TPSC) showcased its theme, "PEROVSKITE AI," at Energy Taiwan 2026, highlighting a two-way synergy between artificial intelligence and perovskite technology. In this paradigm, AI accelerates perovskite material and process development, while perovskite technology meets the AI era's demand for distributed green power, smart sensing, and site-specific energy solutions.