Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has awarded subsidies to three research and development projects, approving NT$100 million (US$3.16 million) for Solomon's humanoid robot Vision-Language-Action technology on May 18. The grants were approved at the sixth final review meeting of the ministry's A+ Enterprise Innovation R&D Tempering Program, which helps companies share R&D costs and risks through expert review and direct funding.

Analog Devices Inc. is in advanced talks to acquire Empower Semiconductor for about US$1.5 billion in cash, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A formal announcement could come as soon as Tuesday. The deal has not been finalized and could still fall through.

Shortly after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left China following a delegation led by US President Donald Trump, Beijing officials swiftly announced a meeting with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su, drawing market attention to a possible shift in the atmosphere surrounding US-China AI chip cooperation.

Google's announcement for the upcoming Googlebook, which tightly integrates Gemini features, signals that it is no longer limiting its PC strategy to the Chromebook line and is pushing into a higher-end product tier in the AI PC era. Chipmakers, including Intel on the x86 side and Qualcomm and MediaTek on the Arm side, are also joining the race, further intensifying competition in the AI PC market.

Alphabet's Google and Blackstone are planning to launch a new artificial intelligence cloud company that would use Google's proprietary AI chips to compete in the fast-growing AI infrastructure market, according to reports from Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal.

Nvidia's fanless Vera Rubin AI server racks, slated for mass production in the second half of 2026, are expected to accelerate global adoption of liquid cooling across server components, creating demand beyond GPUs for CPUs, memory, network cards, and switches, and reshaping thermal management supply chains worldwide and vendor economics.

Chinese officials have renewed calls to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) more deeply into manufacturing as Beijing seeks to modernize traditional industries, strengthen industrial competitiveness, and cultivate new growth drivers.

Baidu said its core AI businesses became the majority of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2026, driven by rapid growth in AI cloud infrastructure, expanded foundation-model support on its model-as-a-service platform Qianfan, and stronger commercial adoption of its Kunlunxin AI chips.

Analysts offered mixed assessments of Baidu after the Chinese internet company posted first-quarter revenue that topped market expectations, with some pointing to stronger AI monetization. In contrast, others warned that profitability remains under pressure from rising investment and lower-margin AI businesses.

Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, a specialized version of its Claude generative AI designed to integrate directly with law firms' existing tools and workflows, the company announced. The offering arrives as legal use cases have surged on Claude, and it targets contract analysis, litigation support, employment, intellectual property, and privacy compliance workflows.

Anthropic urged US policymakers to tighten chip export controls and pass legislation banning so-called distillation attacks, warning that failure to act could allow China to shape global AI rules by 2028. In a recent policy report, the AI developer said that compute capacity remains the decisive factor in the US-China AI competition and that existing export controls have given the US a current lead.

CyCraft announced an expansion of its Japan strategy at its CyCraft Day Japan partner summit, teaming with local cybersecurity providers, including NTT Security and Future Secure Wave, to offer AI-managed security services amid rising geopolitical risks and supply chain attacks. The vendor said more than 20 Japanese cybersecurity service providers and 70 representatives from industry, government, and academia attended the event, where CyCraft outlined a shift from channel sales to local value creation in Japan.

Anthropic agreed to brief members of the Financial Stability Board, the G20 body for finance officials and central bank governors, on the cyber risk profile of its Claude Mythos model after a request from the Bank of England governor, sources told Financial Times. The sessions will explain how Mythos can automatically uncover cybersecurity vulnerabilities across global banks and financial systems and outline the model's potential impact on cyber defenses and financial stability.

OpenAI said it has crossed 900 million weekly active users for ChatGPT and completed a US$12.2 billion private financing round at the end of March, but executives signaled the company may seek additional capital as compute demand outstrips available resources. A spokesperson said the firm raised the historic sum to provide flexibility, yet future funding decisions will hinge on demand growth, revenue performance, cash flow, and whether the compute gap can be closed.

Acer is gaining ground in India's PC market, with the Taiwanese PC vendor citing the latest market data showing it ranked second in the country in the first quarter of 2026.

AI-driven memory demand has sent NAND prices soaring more than 20-fold, but flash memory and hard drive makers alike remain cautious about large-scale capacity expansion. SanDisk argues that the widening price gap between NAND and hard disk drives (HDDs) has further weakened the economic case for solid-state drives (SSDs) to replace HDDs in AI data centers.

China's foundry sector is charting a different course as the global semiconductor market remains focused on AI GPUs, the 2nm process node, and advanced packaging. Led by Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) and Hua Hong Semiconductor, domestic Chinese foundries have not stalled under US sanctions; instead, they are accelerating efforts to build a China-specific foundry ecosystem amid the AI boom, recovering demand for mature nodes, and a push for supply-chain self-reliance.

Kristin White, transportation industry executive and field strategist at Google, delivered a keynote at the 5th Mobis Mobility Day in Sunnyvale that outlined the company's vision for a new era of physically capable AI — one that moves beyond generating ideas to taking action in the real world.

The humanoid robotics industry is heading for a brutal shakeout. Despite more than 100 startups currently active across the US, Europe, and China, Saeed Amidi, founder and CEO of Plug and Play, predicts that only "one or two will become the next Hyundai or the next Hyundai Mobis" — the rest will fall away.

Hyundai Mobis is moving to become a core supplier to the humanoid robotics industry, announcing a direct actuator supply agreement with Boston Dynamics and outlining a sweeping strategy to redirect its automotive manufacturing capabilities toward a market it sees as the defining industrial opportunity of this era. The company's Tier-1 auto supplier position, it argues, makes it uniquely equipped to tackle what it identifies as the sector's most critical constraint: actuator supply at scale.

Pradeep S. Shenoy, a computing technology expert at Texas Instruments's (TI) US headquarters, recently shared his views on 800V architectures for AI data centers in a media appearance. He said 800V solutions will not see broad adoption in AI data centers in 2026, but rollout will accelerate year by year from 2027.

Apple has added a new high blood pressure notification feature to Apple Watch, sharpening the device's health-management appeal. Market watchers expect a major redesign of high-end Apple Watch models in the second half of 2026, which could boost end-market shipments by 20% to 30% from 2025 as incoming CEO John Ternus takes over on September 1.

Taiwan precision motion-control leader Hiwin Technologies is accelerating growth on the back of semiconductor automation and robotics demand, with robot-related products emerging as a rapidly expanding revenue driver as the company deepens its push into wafer-handling systems, logistics robots, and humanoid robot components.

Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) has revealed that three applicants have submitted bids for its AI compute center BOO (build-own-operate) program, which closed on May 14, 2026. The disclosure comes as Foxconn is widely reported to be highly interested in building a large AI compute center.