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Friday 4 September 2026
Moonshot AI reportedly files for Hong Kong IPO, targets US$3B
Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has reportedly filed confidentially for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, potentially setting up one of the city's most closely watched technology listings and one of the largest Chinese AI IPOs in recent years.
Friday 4 September 2026
Nvidia sets an October launch for RTX Spark PCs, gives local AI a router
Nvidia used IFA 2026 to argue that serious AI work can run locally as well as in the cloud, pairing an October launch date for its RTX Spark Windows PCs with free software that distributes independent inference requests across compatible machines already on a local network.
Friday 4 September 2026
OpenAI says Astra crosses critical cybersecurity threshold, adding tighter safeguards
OpenAI said its Astra model has reached a critical level of cybersecurity capability, warning that advanced tools could help users find and exploit unknown flaws in hardened systems. The designation signals stronger safeguards before release, and it matters globally because such capabilities could reshape both cyber defense and cybercrime across markets.
Friday 4 September 2026
Analysts read Nvidia's Hugging Face deal as a hedge, not a software bet
Nvidia's agreement to buy Hugging Face for roughly US$13 billion is being framed by analysts less as a move into software than as insurance against three ways its core business could deteriorate: cheaper open-weight models eroding the frontier labs that buy its chips, those same labs diversifying their silicon, and enterprises pulling workloads out of hyperscaler bundles. On each of those paths, owning the industry's main model repository pays off.
Friday 4 September 2026
Nvidia's Hugging Face terms pay out its chip rivals and reserve US$1 billion to keep the staff
The mechanics of Nvidia's US$12.93 billion purchase of Hugging Face say as much about the deal's purpose as the strategic case does: a tenth of the consideration is set aside to stop the team from walking, part of the payout goes to Intel and AMD, and the whole transaction is framed against an open-weight model market in which the fastest-moving suppliers are Chinese.
Friday 4 September 2026
Nvidia buys the front door to open AI with a US$12.93 billion Hugging Face deal
Nvidia's agreement to acquire Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion pushes the world's dominant AI chip supplier past silicon and into the layer where developers actually pick their models — a position that gives it early sight of demand shifts, a structural hedge against customers designing their own accelerators, and a neutrality problem it has already had to answer for in writing.
Friday 4 September 2026
D-Wave, quantum computing's oldest company, is now building a second kind of machine
D-Wave has spent 26 years building one type of quantum computer. This week it told a Taipei audience why it started building another.
Friday 4 September 2026
K-Safety Expo 2026: South Korea's safety AI moves from watching danger to acting on it
At first glance, many of the technologies spread across the K-Safety Expo 2026 show floor in Busan looked familiar: CCTV cameras, industrial sensors, warning lights and control panels. But after moving from booth to booth on September 2, a more consequential shift became clear. South Korea's emerging safety systems are increasingly being built not simply to record what went wrong, but to recognize risk early enough to intervene.
Friday 4 September 2026
K-Safety Expo 2026: Inside Korea's push to make safety smarter, faster, more predictive
K-Safety Expo 2026 opened at BEXCO Exhibition Center 1 in Busan on September 2. An hour-long opening ceremony beginning at 11 a.m. brought together South Korean government officials, international organization representatives and industry participants to mark the start of the three-day safety-industry exhibition. The 12th edition is jointly hosted by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and Busan Metropolitan City.
Friday 4 September 2026
ENE Technology eyes 4Q26 drone scale-up with satellite link
Microcontroller maker ENE Technology is pushing into the drone market by integrating resources from other group companies and selling complete drone systems. The company expects volume shipments in the fourth quarter of 2026 and is currently focusing on commercial and industrial markets.
Friday 4 September 2026
Taiwan to expand industrial land for AI hardware boom
Taiwan's government says it will expand industrial land development to meet surging demand for AI infrastructure hardware, as global suppliers race to add capacity through 2027. Premier Jung-tai Cho said the government is already seeing strong demand from companies looking to build more plants in Taiwan, including semiconductor, packaging and testing, memory, substrate, and equipment makers, as well as foreign investors such as Nvidia and Micron Technology.
Friday 4 September 2026
Acer unveils IFA lineup with AI, slim notebooks, sustainability
Acer used its next@acer global press conference in Berlin during IFA to unveil a broad lineup of new products, highlighting its push into AI, sustainability, thin-and-light notebooks, e-paper, handheld gaming devices, electric scooters, and the Acer SFF RTX Spark desktop design powered by the NVIDIA RTX Spark superchip.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Infineon sees AI data centers, physical AI as growth drivers
Infineon said the rapid buildout of AI data centers and emerging Physical AI applications could reshape semiconductor demand worldwide. The shift signals higher infrastructure spending, faster power technology adoption, and new competition in robotics, vehicles, and industrial systems that may influence future chip markets and supply chains.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Fei-Fei Li's World Labs unveils Atlas world model for 3D AI and robotics

World Labs, the startup founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled Atlas, a multimodal world model designed to generate, reconstruct, and simulate three-dimensional environments from text, images, and video. The launch marks a shift from conventional generative AI toward systems that reason about geometry, camera position, depth, and spatial relationships.

Thursday 3 September 2026
Semiconductor sustainability shifts to cost control as fab resource demand surges

Sustainability is not just good for communities and the environment but also good for business. This is the message from a sustainability summit that took place at SEMICON Taiwan this week, with water management and equipment providers seeking to link water recycling, tool upgrades, and efficiency-improving automation to measurable cost savings.

Thursday 3 September 2026
Microsoft unveils two-segment reporting structure, standalone Azure financials
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Solomon leverages AI vision and optical tech to tap semiconductor inspection market
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Taiwan's supply chain is 'one of a kind,' MediaTek CEO says
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
AUO unit eyes TSMC ecosystem as merger benefits emerge
AUO Group's AET Corporation (AET), 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's core operations turned profitable in 2025, and the company is targeting a full-year profit in 2026.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Google to expand Taipei AI infrastructure center as Taiwan ties deepen
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Broadcom puts 30GW, US$350 billion of custom AI silicon on the calendar through fiscal 2028
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Auras sees ASIC revenue reaching 50% in 2027, eyes microchannel cooling production in 2028
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Column: From automation to autonomy—what robotics still needs to make the leap
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
SK Hynix wafer purchases jump 104% on AI demand
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.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Thailand AiPASS unlocks premium AI after lessons
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.