Physical AI that can sense, reason, control machines and interact with people, Salil Raje, senior vice president of AMD's Embedded Computing Group, said TOPS (trillions of operations per second) no longer adequately measures performance, and that the industry must rethink how it defines performance for systems that require end-to-end, real-time responsiveness.

SpaceX has spent two decades proving that hardware once considered too complex, too capital-intensive, or too dependent on entrenched suppliers could sometimes be pulled in-house. Its Q3 earnings call suggests the company now wants to test that philosophy on perhaps the hardest manufacturing problem of all: advanced semiconductor production.

The AI infrastructure race is increasingly becoming a contest over who can turn electrical capacity, cooling systems, and hardware into usable compute the fastest.

Chinese tech giants ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have collectively ordered more than 3 million units of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, representing a total value exceeding US$35 billion, as reported by Reuters.

Toppan Holdings and Japan's Keio University have completed a proof of concept for technology that combines quantum computers with generative AI to support manga and anime production, and have launched follow-up research. The research team generated images through quantum circuits and used AI for background completion, coloring, and resolution enhancement, demonstrating the feasibility of applying quantum technology to content production.

South Korean IC design firm LX Semicon has deployed AI agents in the development of display driver ICs (DDIs), reducing the design time for a benchmark image-processing engine from 10 days to two. The company said two large-size LCD TV DDI products developed with the technology have reached tape-out, with mass production planned for early to mid-2027 for television panels in Greater China.

TPCA Show Taipei 2026, organized by the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association (TPCA), opened on October 20. Unimicron Technology chairman S.C. Chien delivered a keynote at the opening ceremony, discussing key opportunities for printed circuit board (PCB) industry development in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Taiwan's export orders totaled US$114.21 billion in September 2026, up US$11.25 billion, or 10.9%, from the previous month, according to data released by Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) on October 20. After seasonal adjustment, orders rose 1.1%. Compared with September 2025, export orders increased US$42.87 billion, or 62.4%, while growth in New Taiwan dollar terms reached 69.5%.

Nvidia is positioning its Vera CPU as a central component of data-center infrastructure for agentic artificial intelligence, as multistep reasoning and tool calls increase demand for fast serial processing. The company says CPU resources are gaining importance alongside GPUs, while declining GPU-to-CPU ratios signal a potential redesign of AI computing architectures.

Competition among Chinese suppliers is driving down prices for dexterous robotic hands, but cheaper hardware has yet to resolve a bigger challenge for humanoid developers: proving that multi-finger systems can perform industrial tasks reliably and at a competitive cost.

To lower AI hardware adoption barriers and offer alternative compute choices, Amazon has announced TorchNeuron—a native backend allowing existing PyTorch code to run directly on AWS Trainium chips with minimal code changes. The tool enters public beta under the Apache 2.0 open-source license today at the PyTorch Conference North America.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is best understood as revolutionary in modern society, transforming industries and reshaping daily life as successive rounds of rapid growth push AI deeper into nearly every aspect of social and economic activity.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urged German businesses to embrace AI at an industry summit in Berlin on October 19, aiming to revive the economy and modernize industry. Huang specifically called on Germany's automotive and industrial machinery sectors to adopt physical AI by leveraging the country's extensive manufacturing data and expertise.

Global Tek Industrial held an opening ceremony on the 20th for its Super Smart Manufacturing Park in Chonburi, Thailand. Spanning 177,600 square meters, the facility is the group's largest single production base. Having entered trial production in the third quarter of 2026, the plant will expand beyond existing automotive orders to incorporate high-value-added products such as AI liquid cooling and aerospace components, fulfilling customer demand for non-China supply chains.

Intel has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a waiver to the US ban on advanced foreign robots, citing worries that its machines will not receive equipment updates, which could hinder its ability to produce semiconductors in the US. The request comes after the US banned imports of foreign-made robots in July.

Chief Telecom broke ground on a new AI data center at the Central Taiwan Science Park on the 20th, committing approximately NT$3.3 billion (US$101.7 million) to a facility expected to begin operations in the second half of 2028. The project is intended to extend the company's data center growth, as its Lianyun AI Intelligent Data Center is projected to reach full capacity in 2027.

Wistron Medical Technology and Chang Gung University of Science and Technology signed a memorandum of understanding at the university's Linkou campus to advance an AI-enabled training program for the aging and health industries. The partnership will combine industry expertise with academic resources to address rising demand for smart health, digital health and elder-care capabilities as societies move toward super-aged populations.

AI servers are driving demand for power components, transient voltage suppressors (TVS), and electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection devices. Yea Shin Technology, a subsidiary of Eris Technology, will begin trading on Taiwan's emerging stock market on October 23 and plans to raise the share of 6-inch wafers in its capacity from 35% to more than 50%, as its TVS products enter the international AI server supply chain.

Thermaltake is targeting the growing edge AI market with a new workstation lineup. Chairman Kenny Lin said the company has transformed from a gaming components maker into an AI PC and workstation systems provider. The company plans to launch three product lines in the second half of 2026 and aims for AI-related products to contribute 5% to 10% of revenue in 2027.

South Korean substrate maker Daeduck Electronics is accelerating development of ceramic core substrates (CCS) to address warpage and thermal-management challenges as AI semiconductor packages grow larger. The company is conducting performance and internal reliability assessments, plans to advance samples and customer evaluations in 2027 and 2028, and is targeting mass production in 2029, with ceramic cores serving as a material alternative to glass cores for next-generation large-area packages.

South Korean automotive and machinery component makers are among 12 companies identified in a KRW2.2 trillion (approx. US$1.66 billion) private investment plan to develop a domestic humanoid robot supply chain in Daegu, as the region seeks to turn its automotive manufacturing base into a source of actuators, motors and other robot components.

DeepSeek is reportedly working closely with Huawei to influence the design of its future AI chips, a link reportedly closer than typical supplier-customer relationships. The collaboration shows the growing ties between two of China's largest technology firms to sidestep Nvidia.

Nvidia's South Korea representative said the company's Vera CPU already has customers in South Korea and that collaboration with LG Electronics on humanoid robots is expected to deliver results soon. Speaking at KES 2026, Soyoung Jeong outlined Nvidia's role in the shift toward AI agents and physical AI.

FIC Global chairman Leo Chien said the PC market continues to suffer from memory shortages, with a meaningful recovery unlikely in the second half of 2026. However, some industrial PC (IPC) businesses, particularly those in maritime-related applications, have begun to recover from their lows.

Apple's MacBook Neo is intensifying competition in the global low-cost notebook market as rising supply-chain costs push Microsoft and other notebook makers to reassess their product strategies. Microsoft is initially planning to reduce the specifications of its entry-level 12-inch Surface model, reviewing everything from the SoC, memory, camera, and battery to structural components in order to lower the bill of materials (BOM).