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Sunday 13 September 2026
China's robot champions can run; now they have to prove they can earn

China's humanoid robot boom is entering a harder phase. After years of headline-grabbing demonstrations and heavy private funding, companies are being pressed to prove something less theatrical but more consequential: that robots can perform reliable work, generate recurring revenue, and justify their valuations.

Sunday 13 September 2026
AI, 5G upgrades lift Taiwan's top three telecoms in August
Strong demand for AI and AI data centers, along with a wave of enterprise information and communications technology (ICT) projects moving into delivery, helped Taiwan's top three telecom operators extend growth in August 2026. Chunghwa Telecom posted record August revenue, operating profit, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), and earnings per share (EPS); Taiwan Mobile remained the telecom trio's cumulative EPS leader; and FarEasTone set monthly highs in revenue, EBITDA, and net profit.
Sunday 13 September 2026
Column: What is SLAM? The first step in Physical AI
We previously discussed how automation removes environmental uncertainty, while autonomy requires systems to operate in complex settings. The biggest difference is that autonomous robots must enter unstructured environments and get work done, knowing where they are, what surrounds them, and how to move safely and efficiently while carrying out tasks.
Sunday 13 September 2026
AI server exports to US slow; electronics parts jump 1.5 times in August
Taiwan's Ministry of Finance on September 9 said electronic parts exports reached US$32.22 billion in August 2026, a record monthly high, rising US$11.83 billion, or 58%, from the same month in 2025. Integrated circuits rose US$11.55 billion, up 60%, while printed circuit boards increased US$140 million, up nearly 30%.
Sunday 13 September 2026
AI server tracker: Taiwan optics race beyond 1.6T

Taiwan's optical communications supply chain is entering a more consequential phase of the AI infrastructure cycle. Demand is broadening beyond conventional pluggable transceivers toward continuous-wave (CW) lasers, fiber array units (FAUs), external laser sources and co-packaged optics (CPO), while transmission speeds advance from 800G and 1.6T toward 3.2T and beyond.

Saturday 12 September 2026
Rethinking defense perimeters, supply chain resilience in the AI era

The concept of corporate cybersecurity used to begin at the so-called perimeter, with firewalls guarding network entry points, email gateways filtering out suspicious messages, and antivirus software blocking malware. This wall-building mindset at the perimeter worked reasonably well when corporate information systems were relatively closed.

Saturday 12 September 2026
Analysis: Speed built Colossus, yet redundancy may decide whether SpaceX can scale it

Much of the industry attention surrounding AI infrastructure buildouts is now inextricably tied to sheer compute power, with market dominance or competitiveness defined largely by the highest-performing GPUs or the fastest construction.

Saturday 12 September 2026
Exclusive: ASUS xHIS aims to become digital backbone for AI-ready healthcare

Asustek Computer (Asus) has been accelerating the integration of AI, hardware, software, and cloud technologies into healthcare as it builds a next-generation smart healthcare ecosystem. Kuo-Hao Huang, vice president of the Asus AI Research Center, said the biggest challenge hospitals face in adopting AI is not the AI models themselves, but whether their data, workflows, and system architectures are ready.

Friday 11 September 2026
AUO, Innolux accelerate shift from displays to AI, CPO, advanced packaging
Taiwan's panel makers posted mixed August results as the industry's strategic focus shifts beyond monthly revenue toward AI, advanced packaging and co-packaged optics (CPO). AUO and Innolux, the island's two largest panel makers, are accelerating capacity reductions and asset sales while redirecting capital and technology toward higher-growth businesses. For smaller and mid-sized players, however, the path beyond displays remains far less defined.
Friday 11 September 2026
CIOE: Hitachi relies on partnerships, not proprietary tech, to ride China's optical boom

At an optoelectronics trade expo in China, Hitachi High-Tech used its booth not to unveil a flagship product of its own, but to showcase a growing web of partnerships. This is a strategy the company says reflects both its late entry into the photonics race and its long-term goals in the region.

Friday 11 September 2026
Nvidia expands Australian AI factory push as global demand rises
Nvidia's latest partnerships in Australia could reshape where AI capacity is built and who can access it. The plan links power, data centers, and open models to local innovation, while also signaling a broader shift in how countries compete for compute, investment, and AI sovereignty worldwide.
Friday 11 September 2026
Apple's new chip packaging boosts A20 Pro AI power, pushing MediaTek, Qualcomm to follow suit
Apple has unveiled its latest iPhone 18 Pro and the A20 Pro, its first 2nm chip. According to Apple's official specifications, the A20 Pro features a six-core CPU, seven-core GPU, and two 16-core Neural Engines totaling 32 cores.
Friday 11 September 2026
FCC closes a chip-level loophole while media debate another White House retreat

A rule published in the Federal Register on September 11 pushes US communications supply-chain restrictions past the finished device and into the parts inside it, exposing contract manufacturers, router vendors, and e-commerce platforms to a compliance test that begins 30 days after publication.

Friday 11 September 2026
AI server tracker: Taiwan's rack supply chain reveals where the AI buildout is accelerating

The three Taiwanese supply chain categories closest to the physical AI rack — thermal, power supply, and rail kits — booked combined August revenue of NT$121.48 billion (US$3.86 billion), according to monthly filings with the Market Observation Post System (MOPS). The growth rates behind it diverge sharply: rail kits rose 191.2% from a year earlier, thermal 58.4%, and power supply 32.5%. The spread maps where rack-scale deployment is binding.

Friday 11 September 2026
Anthropic disrupts Chinese AI firms' attempts to extract Claude capabilities
Anthropic has disrupted a series of operations in which Chinese AI companies allegedly used its Claude models to extract capabilities for their own AI systems, highlighting growing tensions over AI model distillation and data security.
Friday 11 September 2026
Jensen Huang bets Nvidia's next leg of growth on turning AI compute into an investable asset

Jensen Huang used a Goldman Sachs conference appearance to argue that the constraints on AI's build-out are expanding from silicon into finance, and that Nvidia's next unlock is getting its systems recognized as collateral rather than as depreciating equipment. "We're moving Nvidia Compute from technology to an investable asset," the founder and chief executive told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, calling it "a huge untapped opportunity" that "at the moment, none of it is being valued."

Friday 11 September 2026
Nvidia's US$13 billion Hugging Face deal bets physical AI can start at US$400, not US$40,000
Humanoid robotics has become one of the most visible fronts of the physical-AI race, but the industry's path to scale may depend as much on lowering the cost of experimentation as on making robots more intelligent.
Friday 11 September 2026
Oracle's AI cloud build-out is now rewriting its cost structure

Oracle has passed the point where its artificial-intelligence infrastructure business is large enough to reshape the company's entire income statement. Revenue for the quarter ended August 31, 2026, rose 30% to US$19.3 billion, the company said on September 10, and every headline growth rate was strong. The more consequential shift sits one line lower, in what it now costs Oracle to deliver that revenue.

Friday 11 September 2026
Oracle turns its AI build-out into a delivery number, the cost lands where management said it would

Oracle used its fiscal 2027 first-quarter earnings call to recast the question about its AI infrastructure business from whether demand exists to whether it can build fast enough, and to argue the numbers now answer it.

Friday 11 September 2026
AI server tracker: Taiwan's August filings say demand is still accelerating
The clearest read yet on whether the AI build-out is still accelerating arrived this week in a batch of unaudited Taipei filings, and it accelerated. The 49 Taiwan-listed companies spanning AI server assembly, cooling, power, substrates, materials, networking, test, and optics reported combined August revenue of NT$2.84 trillion (US$89.74 billion), up 76.5% from a year earlier and 9.9% from July, according to their filings to the Market Observation Post System. Both the total and the growth rate are the highest of the cycle, and the year-on-year rate is a step up from July's 61.3%.
Friday 11 September 2026
iPhone Duo leads Apple's new lineup as market stays split

Apple's latest iPhone launch could reshape premium phone demand, but the bigger question is whether the company can answer growing AI competition. While the new foldable iPhone drew the most attention, investors and channel players are watching pricing, repair costs, and Apple's dependence on Google-backed AI more closely.

Friday 11 September 2026
Taiwan startup taps CMOS infrared chips to give robots an electronic 'nose'

Breaking from the industry's mainstream reliance on III-V compound semiconductors, Taiwanese startup Taiwan Nano & Micro-Photonics (N&M) is using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes to develop a single chip capable of emitting more than four wavelengths of mid- to far-infrared light.

Friday 11 September 2026
More memory won't fix AI's bottleneck, says Microsoft's Azure hardware chief
Microsoft's AI accelerator was never designed to compete with Nvidia. It was designed to run Microsoft's own inference workloads across its own fleet, and that scoping decision — made at the outset of the program — explains why the company has no intention of selling the part to anyone else.
Thursday 10 September 2026
Meta loses key AI researcher after billion-dollar hiring push
Meta said on September 9 that AI researcher Andrew Tulloch will leave the company after less than a year, ending a high-profile return that followed one of the biggest talent offers in Silicon Valley. The departure comes after Meta reportedly recruited him with compensation worth as much as US$1.5 billion as it intensified its push to narrow the gap with leading AI developers.
Thursday 10 September 2026
Taiwan EV charging operators face profit squeeze despite rapid network expansion
Taiwan's EV charging industry remains in a fiercely competitive, fragmented phase, according to Blockcert chairman Chang Chung-I. While charging stations may appear to offer an unattended business model, their operations involve numerous complexities that operators often discover only after sites go live, and a lack of operational management experience can result in substantial costs.