Mitsubishi Electric is establishing a cooling-equipment production company in Ohio, joining Daikin Industries in bringing manufacturing closer to US data center customers as delivery times, tariffs and local service become more important competitive factors.
Naver is considering an asset-light structure for a US$10 billion data center expansion under which a Brookfield-led investment vehicle would own GPUs and other infrastructure. At the same time, a Naver subsidiary would sell computing capacity and related services to customers.
Anthropic's US$10 billion computing agreement with seven-month-old startup Volta Infra Holdings Ltd. is the latest sign that the Claude developer is treating compute procurement less like a vendor relationship and more like a hedging strategy.
AMD expects the market for server central processing units (CPUs) to reach approximately US$220 billion by 2030, up from an estimate of more than US$120 billion three months earlier, as the company sees agentic artificial intelligence (AI) creating a new class of CPU-intensive workloads.
AMD CEO Lisa Su indicated during the company's second-quarter 2026 earnings call that an estimate of roughly US$30 billion in 2027 Instinct revenue may be too conservative, telling analysts that the data center AI figure was "probably too low."
AI demand is giving Taiwan's contract manufacturers a rare opening, and Wistron expects the opportunity to broaden in the second half of the year as new customers and products arrive. For global tech buyers, the shift signals tighter supply, firmer prices, and stronger leverage for a small group of server makers.
Roborock Technology, which started out in Xiaomi's ecosystem, has staged a comeback to become the global leader in robot vacuums. After launching its own brand in 2017, the company has spent nine years shedding the label of a Xiaomi contract manufacturer, and now holds a 27% global market share, far ahead of Xiaomi's 8.3%.
Global venture capital has rebounded on the AI boom after the pandemic freeze, with total investment in the first half of 2026 already topping full-year 2025. But the recovery is coming with a warning sign: capital is becoming highly concentrated in AI, while China is pouring money into robotics and drawing scrutiny from the US.
China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said humanoid robots have become a key symbol of the country's emerging manufacturing sector, claiming that 8 of every 10 humanoid and quadruped robots sold globally are produced by Chinese companies. The remarks came at a July 31 press briefing and also highlighted progress in IC design, semiconductor equipment, wafer fabrication, and packaging and testing.
Onsemi's leadership fielded a wide range of investor questions following the company's second-quarter 2026 results, with much of the discussion centered on its accelerating AI data center business, capacity utilization, and how the company is managing rising input costs.
China's leading humanoid robot maker Unitree Technology expects first-half 2026 revenue to reach roughly CNY1.1 billion (US$155.8 million), an increase of 35.6% to 45.4% year on year, as demand for embodied AI continues to grow and the company expands its business scale.
Lite-On Technology delivered record profitability in the second quarter of 2026, with gross margin reaching 27.2%, up 5.1% from a year earlier. President Anson Chiu said the company has secured two additional cloud service provider (CSP) customers in 2026 and remains highly confident that second-half performance will exceed the first half.
