Microsoft has unveiled its consolidation of its operating segments from three down to two: Agents and Infra alongside Devices and Consumer. The tech giant also announced plans to disclose standalone quarterly revenue for its Azure cloud unit.
Solomon Technology, a Taiwanese artificial intelligence (AI) 3D vision company, is showcasing two key inspection applications that integrate its core AI vision and optical technologies at Semicon Taiwan 2026. The applications include full-wafer warpage detection inside front-opening unified pods (FOUP)/cassettes and through-glass via (TGV) aperture defect inspection technology, aimed at preventing equipment downtime during manufacturing processes and ensuring the yield and quality of next-generation advanced packaging.
MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai said Taiwan's supply-chain capabilities are unmatched as the technology industry moves into the AI and robotics era, while joking that the chip designer will need significantly more capacity in the years ahead.
AUO Group's AET SustainTek, formed in September 2025 through the merger of AUO Envirotech and AUO Digitech, is expanding across the semiconductor supply chain and has reportedly entered the ecosystem of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). After the merger, AET SustainTek's core operations turned profitable in 2025, and the company is targeting a full-year profit in 2026.
Google will expand its AI infrastructure research and development center in Taipei's Shilin district, adding 60% more office space, as it deepens work with Taiwan's supply chain on next-generation computing. The move underscores Taiwan's growing role in global AI development, where chip, cooling, and data-center advances affect users worldwide.
Broadcom used its third-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call on September 2 to convert a quarter-by-quarter AI story into a dated, customer-by-customer deployment schedule running into fiscal 2029. Chief executive Hock Tan told analysts that across the company's six XPU customers there is demand for 30GW of accelerated compute in fiscal 2027 and 2028 combined, and that Broadcom expects to ship "US$350 billion of AI semiconductors to these customers in the next two years." He was explicit that not all 30GW will come online inside those two fiscal years — "we judge it conservatively to be somewhat less" — and that the revenue figures, not the gigawatt figures, are the commitment.
Cooling specialist Auras Technology is expanding from GPU platforms to ASIC-related products as its next growth driver, amid the ongoing shift toward liquid cooling in AI servers, with chairman Steve Lin highlighting sustained progress in projects for major international cloud service providers (CSP) such as AWS and Meta.
I visited Automation Taipei 2026 in mid-August, where the show looked lively and occupied a footprint 7% larger than in 2025. Physical AI and vision-language-action (VLA) models dominated the venue. Yet most robots on display still repeated fixed motions behind barriers, highlighting how far robotics has to go to move from automation to autonomy.
SK Hynix boosted its silicon wafer purchases in the second quarter of 2026 by more than doubling spending from the previous quarter as it moved early to secure raw materials amid rising wafer prices and surging AI demand. The increase drew more attention than Samsung Electronics' modest rise over the same period.
Thailand has launched its TH-AI Passport and core AiPASS platform, taking a different path from South Korea's national AI push by buying access to overseas commercial AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude and offering them free to citizens. The move aims to expand AI access while addressing the country's widening AI usage gap.
Two of China's first listed foundation-model developers are showing that demand for their technology can translate into rapidly growing revenue. Turning that demand into profit remains a much harder problem.
TIME recently unveiled its 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI. Alongside leaders of major technology companies, the list includes a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs spanning AI models, humanoid robots, and AI agents, highlighting how China's AI industry is expanding beyond large language models into a broader range of technologies and applications.
The rise of physical AI is creating a new wave of demand for advanced sensors as robots move from controlled demonstrations toward practical deployment. Industry experts at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 said robots will need increasingly diverse sensing capabilities to perceive, interpret, and respond to complex real-world environments in real time.
Sandisk says its NAND-based High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) technology can match HBM bandwidth while providing eight to 16 times the capacity at a similar cost, positioning flash memory closer to processors as inference workloads strain conventional memory systems.
A senior Lam Research executive told an industry audience this week that the next major leap in semiconductor manufacturing will not come from removing humans entirely from fabs, but from pairing collaborative robots with AI-driven predictive maintenance to close a long-standing gap in fab operations.
At a shared stage at Semicon Taiwan 2026, executives from Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron agreed that traditional 2.5D high-bandwidth memory (HBM) using interposers is approaching a performance ceiling. Consequently, the industry is transitioning toward 3D vertical stacking architectures to minimize transmission power consumption and leverage wafer-level bonding technologies.
Cloud AI capital expenditure continues to shatter market expectations, sparking growing concerns over whether the spending surge is overheating and heading toward a bubble. Semicon Taiwan 2026 may serve as the ultimate litmus test for this debate.
Cable manufacturer Wonderful Hi-Tech announced its financial results for the second quarter and first half of 2026 during an earnings call held on September 1. A ramp-up in high-speed transmission cable shipments for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, coupled with strong pull-in momentum from a major US low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite customer, drove second-quarter results. The company also said it is expanding capacity in Thailand and Vietnam to capture new opportunities in space data centers and physical AI.
China-led experts have released what CCTV described as the world's first international standard for legged robots, creating a common framework for evaluating humanoid robots, robot dogs and other machines designed to walk, run, climb slopes and cross obstacles.
As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) continue to drive semiconductor advances, industry competition is shifting beyond chip performance toward packaging, cooling, assembly, and power delivery. With GPUs, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and advanced packaging pushing power density higher, chipmakers now face challenges that extend well beyond silicon manufacturing, including managing thermal expansion, warpage, heat dissipation, and reliability across heterogeneously integrated materials.
As Semicon Taiwan 2026 gets underway, semiconductor test-interface structural parts maker Certain Micro Application Technology (CMAT) announced three core product lines aimed at rising AI and high-performance computing (HPC) chip testing demand: fine drilling for upper and lower guide plates, probe card structural components, and ATE Stiffener test frames.
As artificial intelligence demand drives astronomical growth in advanced chip manufacturing, the semiconductor industry is hitting critical resource bottlenecks. Speaking at SEMICON Taiwan 2026, leaders from Ecolab and Edwards Vacuum warned on September 2 that continuing with current water and energy practices is unsustainable.
Elon Musk has restructured the SpaceX leadership team tasked with constructing the company's AI data centers, replacing several leaders with executives drawn from SpaceX's rocket and satellite internet divisions. The reshuffle follows mounting civil engineering concerns and persistent operational reliability issues at existing data center facilities in Tennessee and Mississippi. During its initial push to establish AI infrastructure rapidly, the company operated clusters for extended periods without backup cooling or power systems, significantly elevating the risk of system outages, sources told The Information.
Manus has resumed independent operations under its founding team, closing a turbulent chapter that began with Meta Platforms' multibillion-dollar acquisition of the AI agent startup and ended after Chinese regulators ordered the transaction canceled.
