Hitachi and Fanuc announced on September 30, 2026, that they have formed a strategic partnership on Physical AI, with internal testing beginning immediately and customer promotion planned for fiscal 2027. The Japanese industrial companies said they intend to apply the technology in manufacturing and other sectors, including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and nursing care.

Under Lisa Su's 12-year tenure at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the company has gradually moved beyond its role as Intel's challenger in the CPU market. But in the accelerator market for training and running AI models, old rival Nvidia still holds the upper hand.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to acquire World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately US$8.2 billion. Following the closing, World Labs will operate as a dedicated frontier research organization for large language models (LLMs) and spatial intelligence, with founder Fei-Fei Li joining AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Chair and CEO Lisa Su.

Synopsys announced a strategic agreement with Amazon on September 30, a multi-year deal valued at more than US$1 billion that is intended to speed up Amazon's custom silicon work and support the development of more complex AI-powered products and cloud infrastructure.

Neweb Information, a Taiwan-based IT systems integrator, is targeting a late-October listing on the Taipei Exchange. Long focused on enterprise core systems, the company has expanded in recent years into AI GPU computing platforms and AI infrastructure, with AI-related revenue in the first half of 2026 already exceeding the level recorded for all of 2025.

Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) has launched a joint cybersecurity audit initiative aiming to reduce repeated inspections on vendors that provide the government with IT services, while strengthening government information security. MODA will expand the joint audit program in 2027.

Apple's entry into India's payments market gives its device users a new way to pay by card, but its initial reach will depend on bank and merchant integrations in a country where a domestic real-time system already dominates digital transactions. The service launched on September 30 for eligible Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cardholders, placing Apple's wallet alongside, rather than replacing, India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Digital transformation integrator ChainSea Information Integration plans to list on Taiwan's over-the-counter (OTC) market in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the process expected to take about a month. The listing would make ChainSea Taiwan's first OTC-listed company focused primarily on business process outsourcing (BPO).

ByteDance occupies around a fifth of data center capacity in China, according to a recent report. This makes the company the largest customer for rented compute in the country at a time when its major AI developers are racing to accelerate infrastructure buildouts and pushing against capacity limits.

Confidential details of Anthropic's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, reveal an enterprise operating at an unprecedented scale and making a historic wager that artificial intelligence will transform the global economy far more profoundly than industrialization, electricity, or the internet. To capture that future, the startup is targeting a public valuation of more than US$2 trillion.

MIPS, a GlobalFoundries (GF) unit, said it has completed its integration with the ARC unit acquired from Synopsys earlier this year and is using the move to position RISC-V for physical AI, while expanding from AIoT into automotive and data center applications. MIPS said the strategy lowers the barrier for global customers to adopt GF platforms across process technologies and has pushed GF and MIPS to become the world's second-largest processor IP provider.

Qualcomm Technologies held its Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui, Hawaii, from September 22 to 24. During the keynote on the second day, Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon spoke with co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI Ramin Hasani.

Nvidia expanded its open-source CUDA-Q platform with CUDA-Q Logical, an orchestration layer aimed at helping researchers build software for fault-tolerant quantum computers. The company said the platform already integrates with about 75% of publicly available quantum processing units (QPUs), giving developers a common environment across multiple hardware types.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering enterprise operations, blurring the lines between cybersecurity and supply chain management. In the AI era, Zero Trust is no longer only about who can access a system. Enterprises must also ask whom and what they depend on, how concentrated those dependencies are, and what happens when a critical link fails.

DeepSeek founder Wen-Feng Liang's latest paper says AI agents are already learning to exploit system loopholes and bypass intended problem-solving methods during training, underscoring a new challenge for model development: how to stop models from taking shortcuts.

When companies discuss ESG, they often emphasize environmental issues and compliance while paying less attention to employee health, a key component of the social dimension, according to Saxon Chen, founder and CEO of Taiwanese digital health technology company H2U Corp.

Physical AI is accelerating like never before. Autonomous intelligent machines can walk, run, fly, swim, and assemble car parts in under a minute. New advances in AI models and technologies like dexterous hands are also pushing the boundaries of how smart and useful humanoids can be.

Microsoft announced that it will invest US$10 billion in expanding AI infrastructure in the Middle East by 2030. The commitment directs funding to a region facing threats from the war in Iran, where data center construction has continued despite the ongoing conflict.

Grab is expanding the scope of its Taiwan strategy beyond food delivery, launching an overseas expansion programme for merchants aimed at helping Taiwanese food and beverage (F&B) brands enter Southeast Asian markets.

While generative AI has surged into mainstream consumer use thanks to ChatGPT, the adoption of AI across industrial sectors has progressed at a much slower pace. Industry analysts point out that the primary culprit is the tendency of current AI architectures to "hallucinate," a fatal vulnerability in manufacturing environments where there is no tolerance for error. As industrial AI development cannot rely on large language models (LLMs) alone, attention is rapidly shifting toward industry world models that anchor AI systems in the laws of physics. Recognizing this pivot, global industrial software giants are already aggressively positioning themselves in this space.

LG Electronics entered a partnership with Microsoft to cooperate on a range of AI initiatives. The two firms agreed to work together on AI data centers, LG Electronics' AI data transformation, and physical AI as the company known for appliances taps into growing AI-related industries.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. doubled down on its full-stack AI strategy at the 2026 Apsara Conference, which opened on Sept. 22 at the Hangzhou International Expo Center. Alibaba Group chairman Joe Tsai made a rare appearance at the opening ceremony and said AI is moving from frontier exploration toward real-world deployment and large-scale applications.

Silicon Valley's AI safety debate is increasingly splitting into two camps; Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says science and technology should serve humanity, that companies should not create things they cannot control, and that regulation should not automatically be seen as a bad thing.

The extraordinary technological progress humanity has witnessed since AI first emerged has propelled a fundamental shift in industrial development. With experts hailing AI as the next phase of the digital revolution and an extension of Industry 4.0, the technology is increasingly reshaping how industries operate.