Rapid changes in the power and thermal requirements of AI accelerators are forcing data-center designers to incorporate chip-level information earlier in the planning process, according to Cadence Design Systems. This is narrowing a gap that once separated semiconductor development from facility engineering.
The memory industry is undergoing a structural shift as AI demand surges, and Etron Technology chairman Nicky Lu said the sector's boom will stretch beyond 2027, with shortages likely lasting through 2028 and possibly into 2030. He said supply is tightening further as AI and edge computing create rigid demand, pushing the supply chain to focus on higher-value applications.
Autonomous driving technology is maturing, and a future in which cars entirely drive themselves is quickly approaching in the rearview mirror. Yet safety and trust remain crucial barriers to overcome before fully autonomous driving becomes a reality, and a key part of this is the "eyes" of the car.
As AI develops rapidly, data centers are driving equally rapid growth in electricity demand. The stability of future energy supplies will directly determine whether AI computing capacity can continue to expand.
As AI chips continue to grow in size, the shift in advanced packaging from 300 mm wafers to square panels is becoming clearer, driving parallel development of new packaging technologies including FOPLP, CoPoS, and Glass Core. Manz Asia general manager Robert Lin said yield will determine whether Glass Core can move into mass production.
The global memory market is entering a sharp upcycle as cloud providers boost capital spending and demand for AI infrastructure lifts DRAM, NAND, and HBM prices. According to DIGITIMES, the three largest upstream memory chip makers are headed for a more than threefold jump in combined DRAM and NAND revenue in 2026, with supply constraints likely to keep pricing firm until new capacity arrives in 2027.
Optical communications will likely enter AI server racks in 2028, DIGITIMES analyst Joyce Chen said on August 20 at a semiconductor industry forum in Taipei, as rising AI cluster scale drives demand for faster data transfer, lower latency, and higher-bandwidth interconnects.
The AI industry is watching the rise of co-packaged optics (CPO) as faster AI systems now depend on more efficient links between chips and data centers. At DIGITIMES Tech Forum 2026 in Taipei, analyst Jerry Zheng said the technology is moving toward mainstream adoption as bandwidth demand outpaces computing gains.
Foundry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) grew 37% year to date — and still lost four percentage points of the sub-sector's revenue share, because the other 26 manufacturers grew more than twice as fast.
Thirty-eight of 43 companies grew year to date at a median rate of 28.7% — the highest of any semiconductor sub-sector — with test handlers, sockets and probe cards recurring across company filings.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) is currently one of the hottest areas of technology and product development for AI data centers. It is not only the first layer of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described as the industry's "five-layer cake," but also a concrete manifestation of the idea that computing power ultimately depends on electrical power.
One word in Marvell Technology's August 19 filing decides how the Google agreement should be read. The custom silicon programs, it says, attach to the tensor processing unit (TPU) ecosystem. Attach, not replace.
Apple kicked off the tablet OLED era in 2024, introducing Tandem OLED in the iPad Pro to overcome bottlenecks in display lifespan and brightness. The iPad mini followed, set to adopt OLED in the second half of 2026, though with annual shipments hovering at just 2 million units, its impact is largely symbolic. Market research firm UBI Research noted that tablet OLED growth has largely stalled through 2024 and 2025, with OLED costs remaining the primary hurdle: panels currently run roughly twice the price of LCD alternatives, and narrowing that gap is widely viewed as the primary prerequisite for expanding OLED adoption in IT applications.
Unitree Robotics' August 19 debut on Shanghai's STAR Market did more than crown China's first mainland-listed humanoid robot maker. It marked a shift in the industry from competition between robot brands to a harder contest over supply-chain cost, AI capability, and mass production.
Marvell Technology is set to deepen its role in Google's AI infrastructure through an expanded agreement to develop custom chips, in a deal that could generate roughly US$120 billion in revenue for the chipmaker through fiscal 2033 if Google meets purchasing targets tied to the warrant, according to Reuters. The scale of that figure is the story: it reframes Marvell not as a niche supplier, but as a structural bet by Google on custom silicon over merchant GPUs.
