China's optical suppliers are playing a growing role in the global smart glasses, VR, and AR supply chain as AI glasses demand accelerates worldwide. Industry sources say more than 80% of smart glasses suppliers are from China, with Chinese vendors covering key areas from camera modules and light waveguides to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and batteries.
Fast-moving advances in chip production have spurred a semiconductor boom, markedly altering the manufacturing scope of the broader high-tech industry.
Taiwan has demonstrated its strong R&D and innovative capabilities in tech, but the challenge remains in propelling these technologies to global markets. In the opinion of Edison Awards CEO Frank Bonafilia, Taiwan is not lacking in innovation, but the real hurdles lie in securing capital and backing from major investment banks, and building partnerships with major global firms to commercialize and scale up Taiwan-developed technologies.
Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), a subsidiary of Foxconn, held FIT Tech Day 2026 on September 16 under the theme "Light at Scale: The Next Frontier in Data Center Interconnects," bringing together global leaders from the optical communications, AI, and semiconductor industries to examine the next generation of AI connectivity across light sources, materials, photonics, network architecture, manufacturing, and the broader industry ecosystem.
Huawei has unveiled its next-generation Ascend 960 supernode, positioning near-packaged optics (NPO) at the centre of its effort to scale AI computing beyond the limits of individual accelerators. Huawei said the system is the industry's first supernode to adopt NPO and is designed to support large-scale training and inference for models with up to 10 trillion parameters.
China's top three liquid-crystal display (LCD) panel makers have sent written price-increase notices to customers for the first time, as Taiwan's leading panel makers sell factories and China tightens its grip on the global market. With South Korea and Japan already out of the thin-film-transistor LCD (TFT-LCD) market, China now controls more than 70% of LCD TV and monitor panel share, creating an effective oligopoly.
At the FIT Tech Day 2026 on September 16, Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT) chairman Sidney Lu noted that as artificial intelligence (AI) advances rapidly, the industry's focus is shifting from simply pursuing greater computing power to improving the overall efficiency of data centers. He said the key to the next 10 years of AI lies not only in chips and computing performance, but also in whether data can flow smoothly within data centers and across different systems through faster, more stable, and more efficient connectivity.
Former Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are set to attend a White House state dinner on Sept. 24, 2026, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other business leaders also expected to attend, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump, who is hosting the dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington, has invited Cook, Altman, Huang and other business leaders — even as a fight over the pace of AI development roils Silicon Valley and Washington alike. OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, has confirmed Altman's attendance.
General-purpose home robots are the ultimate goal for the humanoid robotics industry, but the market remains at an early stage. DIGITIMES analysts said the key to commercialization is not just whether a robot can move, but whether it can understand a complex and constantly changing home environment, complete tasks, and execute different functions reliably.
Wonju, a South Korean city of about 360,000, roughly 90 minutes east of Seoul, opened a government-funded institute on Thursday, September 17, to train more than 1,400 workers in artificial intelligence over five years.
Apple is exploring a return to the enterprise server market with an AI inference system built around future M8 Ultra chips, potentially using Nvidia's NVLink Fusion interconnect technology.
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