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Wednesday 25 March 2026

Analysis: Qualcomm restructures Asia operations, giving Taiwan greater strategic weight

At a spring banquet in Taiwan, Qualcomm used the occasion not only to recap highlights from its recent appearances at major industry exhibitions, but also to underscore the growing importance of 6G standards in an AI-driven era. More consequentially, ST Liew—Vice President of Qualcomm Technologies and President for Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and Australia/New Zealand—announced a structural shift: Qualcomm's Taiwan operations will be elevated into a standalone region, reporting directly to the APAC president, on par with markets such as Japan and South Korea.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

OpenAI refocuses strategy, scales back Sora and shopping while doubling down on 'superapp' vision

OpenAI is undertaking a broad strategic reset, narrowing its product portfolio even as it expands hiring, in a move that reflects intensifying competition and mounting financial pressures in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

Xiaomi flags memory pressure, sees Apple user conversions, and pushes embodied AI strategy

Xiaomi executives outlined the group's 2025 performance and strategic priorities during an investor earnings call and webcast on March 24. Management highlighted record annual revenue and adjusted net profit, then devoted much of the presentation to artificial intelligence (AI), embodied intelligence (physical AI), and progress in the company's electric vehicle (EV) business. The call opened with standard operator instructions and procedural remarks from investor relations, followed by prepared remarks from Xiaomi president Lu Weibing and CFO Alain Lam Sai Wai, who fielded investor questions.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

Agentic AI shift puts CPUs at the core as Arm rolls out first chip

Arm has officially launched the Arm AGI CPU, a new class of mass-production-ready processor built on its Neoverse platform and designed to power next-generation AI infrastructure. Mohamed Awad, executive vice president of Arm's cloud AI business, also outlined the company's latest strategic roadmap alongside the announcement.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

Arm unveils AGI CPU aimed at scaling agentic AI, promising higher rack performance and lower data center costs

Arm on March 24, 2026, announced the Arm AGI CPU, its first mass-produced chip product, designed specifically for AI data centers and built on TSMC's 3nm process. The company presented the chip as a response to accelerating demand for processors capable of handling agentic AI workloads at scale.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

Taiwan Mask poised for advanced packaging growth in 2H26 off semiconductor rebound

Riding a semiconductor industry recovery and AI-driven demand for advanced packaging, Taiwan Mask Corporation (TMC) President Lidon Chen said the company expects significant and substantial core business growth in the second half of 2026. Despite headwinds from geopolitical tensions and competition from China, TMC is cautiously optimistic about full-year operations, backed by product line expansions and advanced process deployments, with current capacity utilization exceeding 90%.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

At AI Expo, Google Quantum AI software engineering manager sees shifts toward fault-tolerant quantum computing

The annual AI industry showcase hosted by DIGITIMES, AI Expo, is set to open from March 25 to 27 at the Taipei Expo Park. This year's event will feature Ping Yeh, software engineering manager at Google Quantum AI, as a keynote speaker.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

Taiwan drone camera demand stalls over unclear specifications

Imaging technologies are expanding beyond time-lapse photography and consumer applications into higher-barrier military uses as the industry repositions in the post-pandemic era.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

How one recycler firm turns TSMC's chip waste into steel mill gold

Every advanced chip leaves behind a chemical trail. The solvents, acids, and sludge generated in semiconductor fabrication are growing faster than the fabs themselves — and for most of the world, they remain an expensive, hazardous liability. In Taiwan, one company has turned that problem into a business.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

SoftBank-backed SAIMEMORY plans post-HBM shift with vertical memory tech

SAIMEMORY, a Japanese startup backed by SoftBank, is positioning its proprietary Z-Angle Memory (ZAM) as a potential successor to high-bandwidth memory (HBM) as physical limits begin to constrain current AI architectures, according to Nikkei and PC Watch.

Wednesday 25 March 2026

Team Group posts 50x profit surge in January; annual procurement impact seen in 2Q26

Memory module maker Team Group reported a record-high monthly profit for January 2026, with earnings soaring over 50 times year-over-year. Although shipments declined in February due to the Lunar New Year holidays, the company expects a full recovery of shipment momentum over March. Annual procurement strategies and specification adjustments among system integrator (SI), edge computing, and OEM customers for high-end memory products are anticipated to drive sales in the second quarter of 2026.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Why Switzerland chose a bottom-up approach over big tech grandstanding

During the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an impassioned case for digital sovereignty. "Build your own AI, take advantage of your fundamental natural resource, which is your language and culture," he urged. "Develop your AI, continue to refine it, and have your national intelligence part of your ecosystem."

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Sharp taps BD chief as CEO in post-restructuring shift

Sharp Corporation, a subsidiary of Foxconn, has named its Chief Business Development Officer, Tetsuji Kawamura, as its next president and CEO, placing an executive with deep overseas and new-business experience at the helm as the Japanese electronics maker pivots from restructuring toward growth.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

WWDC26: Apple signals AI maturity and 'charm approach' to China amid Tim Cook's visit

Apple officially confirmed on Monday that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will return from June 8 to June 12, 2026. While the core experience remains online and free for its 34-million-strong developer community, the company is doubling down on a hybrid strategy, hosting a marquee in-person event at Apple Park on opening day.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Analysis: How Nvidia is reshuffling partners for the inference era

On August 15, 2023, a routine press release landed in the inboxes of semiconductor analysts and tech journalists worldwide. Titled "Groq Selects Samsung Foundry to Bring Next-gen LPU to the AI Acceleration Market," it presented a classic David-versus-Goliath narrative.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

AI boom lifts substrate maker Kinsus as prices and demand rise

Buoyed by strong demand from makers of AI GPUs, CPUs, and application-specific chips, Kinsus Interconnect Technology said it expects a sharp lift in both revenue and product mix as new capacity for ABF substrates comes online.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

MediaTek's Airoha takes on US giants in optical comms DSP chip arena

The expansion of AI data centers is creating new business opportunities that are opening the door for upstarts to challenge industry leaders. A prime example is the four-level pulse amplitude modulation digital signal processing (PAM4 DSP) chip market for optical communications, which is shifting from a duopoly dominated by US leaders Marvell Technology and Broadcom to a more diversified vendor landscape. MediaTek's subsidiary Airoha is now striving to climb this competitive ladder.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

China's AI GPUs face equipment and software constraints, but system-level design boosts self-reliance

Although it may appear that China's AI GPU development is behind the US by one or more generations, a recent Morgan Stanley report reveals the actual gap is smaller than widely perceived.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

OpenClaw lands in WeChat, signaling a new era of AI agents in messaging

Tencent has officially launched ClawBot, a plugin that integrates the popular open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw into its flagship messaging platform, WeChat, marking a significant move in China's AI race. The integration allows WeChat's over one billion monthly active users to send commands and interact with OpenClaw directly within their chat interface, turning conversations into actionable AI interactions. Setup takes just two minutes via a QR code scan or a copied command.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Alibaba unveils XuanTie C950 and C925, advancing RISC-V into AI and edge computing

Alibaba's DAMO Academy has introduced two new RISC-V processors—the flagship XuanTie C950 and the energy-efficient C925—marking a significant step in pushing the open-source architecture into both high-performance AI and edge applications.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Excellence Optoelectronics accelerates Mexico plant ramp-up, eyes robot and ECU markets

Excellence Optoelectronics (EOI) is preparing for volume production to begin in July at its soon-to-be-completed Phase 1 plant in Mexico, aiming for an 80% utilization rate by year-end with 88 LED automotive lighting modules produced at the new facility. The company has also seen stellar results from its new AI smart city and system integration businesses, and expects the combined driving force of automotive and AI to propel steady revenue growth throughout 2026, after posting strong results for a usually slow first quarter.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Trump administration's 'Pax Silica' fund to strengthen global semiconductor and AI supply chains

The Trump administration set up a US$250 million fund intended to grow out of its "Pax Silica" initiative launched in December 2025, aimed at supporting global supply chains for semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), and critical minerals, according to the New York Times. The fund represents the first step in a voluntary consortium that could attract up to US$1 trillion in investments from allies, including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Britain, and Australia, with the US committing US$250 million.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

TSMC's Wei draws battle lines between US AI and China's hardware in robotics race

TSMC chairman C.C. Wei's recent remarks on the global robotics landscape have sparked an industry debate over whether the US or China holds the upper hand in the race to commercialize humanoid robots.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Nvidia opens server racks to rival chips, expanding cloud infrastructure role

Nvidia is expanding its role in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure by designing server racks that can accommodate processors from its competitors, according to a report by The Information, citing people familiar with the matter.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Huawei's Ascend 950PR debuts with nearly 3x H20 performance, targets China's AI compute gap

Huawei has officially launched its Ascend 950PR processor and introduced the Atlas 350 AI accelerator card equipped with this chip, marking the commercial debut of its next-generation inference computing platform. At Huawei China Partner Conference 2026, the company showcased the Ascend 950PR AI chip, highlighting that a single Atlas 350 card delivers up to 2.87x the compute power of Nvidia's H20, emphasizing its FP4 low-precision inference capabilities, a rare feature among AI accelerators in the Chinese market.

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