Holy Stone Enterprise warns that AI-driven power upgrades are creating global shortages and record demand for multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), with lead times beyond 20 weeks and tighter supply expected through 2027. The developments could reshape supply chains for servers, data centers, and high-power consumer electronics worldwide, and accelerate global investment in components.
As Micron Technology's decision to restart large-scale DDR4 production in the US grabs global attention, memory-chip executives and analysts say the move is less a revival of aging technology than a strategic reshuffling of supply aimed at safeguarding critical American industries.
AI computing's massive demand for infrastructure is making interconnect and laser technologies key to overcoming power and bandwidth limits, prompting silicon photonics unicorn Lightmatter to unveil its latest laser product, Guide DR. To advance its 3D-stacked silicon photonics engine, Lightmatter is also working closely with TSMC using its Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE) platform.
ADATA Technology said it will present a cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence ecosystem at COMPUTEX 2026, bringing together its enterprise storage brand TRUSTA, ADATA Industrial, gaming brand XPG, and AIoT unit ATrack to showcase hardware and software integrations across data centers, PCs, and edge devices. The company announced partnerships and cross-domain integrations with Nvidia, Intel, Advantech, Asus ROG, MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock, and Razer. It highlighted solutions aimed at reducing deployment costs and extending AI to smart living and mobility scenarios.
Powerchip announced it will present a "3D AI Foundry" showcase at COMPUTEX 2026 to demonstrate 3D wafer-on-wafer (WoW) DRAM stacking, interposers, and Si-cap integrated passive devices as part of an end-to-end offering for AI chips, addressing rising demand for GenAI and high-performance computing for memory capacity, bandwidth, and energy efficiency. The firm said it is leveraging its combined logic and memory processing capabilities, along with customer IP and product design services, to target AI workloads facing growing memory bandwidth and power constraints.
South Korea and the Netherlands are looking to broaden their semiconductor partnership beyond ASML's EUV lithography machines, as silicon photonics (SiPh) emerges as a potential next field of cooperation amid rising power and bandwidth demands from AI data centers.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pushing the company deeper into the CPU market, betting that the rise of agentic AI will create a new growth engine beyond the GPUs that made Nvidia the dominant supplier of AI computing hardware.
Kioxia is targeting 2027 production of its 10th-generation BiCS 10 NAND, a move that could help the Japanese memory maker narrow its technology gap with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as the South Korean rivals delay investment in their own next-generation NAND technologies, according to ZDNet Korea.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will reportedly cut employee bonuses by 15%, prompting some employees to voice dissatisfaction on social media. They argued that while TSMC's profits have soared, the share allocated to employee bonuses has decreased rather than increased, with some employees threatening to follow Samsung Electronics' union with a strike to fight for their rights.
Lam Research's Lam Capital recently held its fourth startup competition, drawing teams from the US, South Korea, Singapore, India, and Taiwan to vie for a sizeable prize pool. US startup Lightfinder won the top prize with a proposal centered on silicon photonics and intelligent software for a chip-scale spectrometer.
As the global semiconductor industry confronts the limits of Moore's Law, Huawei has unveiled a new roadmap aimed at extending chip performance growth through architecture, interconnect, and system-level optimisation rather than pure transistor miniaturisation.
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