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Wednesday 26 August 2026
Cook's parting shot: Apple takes AI compute out of data centers
Apple took pre-orders on August 25 for a new Mac mini and Mac Studio. Both will ship on September 22. Prices of the Mac mini start at US$899 with the M6 chip, or $1,699 with the M5 Pro. Mac Studio starts at $2,499 with M5 Max and $5,499 with M5 Ultra. The 512GB memory version comes in late October.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
Nvidia earnings hinge on Rubin ramp and Vera CPU
Nvidia will release its fiscal second-quarter 2027 financial results on August 26, US time. Given Nvidia's performance pattern in recent quarters, Wall Street has come to expect a "beat and raise" outcome. Ahead of the print, multiple investment firms released preview reports focusing on whether the Rubin platform can smoothly succeed Blackwell and whether AI demand continues to significantly outstrip supply.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
China GPU race, Part 2: Moore Threads, MetaX, Biren and Enflame pursue four formulas for breaking Nvidia's grip
Enflame's planned US$893 million STAR Market IPO, examined in Part 1 of this series, highlights both the opportunity and the financial strain facing China's emerging AI chip suppliers, but profitability is only one part of the competition.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
China GPU race, Part 1: Enflame IPO spotlights Tencent ties, deep losses and AI chip ambitions
Enflame Technology is preparing to become the latest of China's leading AI chip developers to tap public markets, with a CNY6 billion (approx. US$893 million) Shanghai STAR Market listing that puts its rapid revenue growth, persistent losses and heavy reliance on Tencent under closer scrutiny.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
Google's TPU v10 turns multi-vendor, deepening MediaTek's ASIC role
Google's expanding list of TPU partners has sparked widespread industry discussion, centering on whether current IC design suppliers Broadcom and MediaTek will see their orders impacted.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
India chip manufacturing push exposes production-test skills gap, NI says
India's semiconductor expansion is beginning to expose a shortage of engineers with experience in production testing, a capability that will become increasingly important as new OSAT plants and fabs move toward manufacturing, executives at Emerson's NI test and measurement business said.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
Nvidia unveils Jetson Orin Nano 2 for edge AI robots and drones
Nvidia has introduced Jetson Orin Nano 2, a compact robotics computer aimed at entry-level edge AI, with implications for developers building autonomous machines worldwide. The system promises faster, more efficient on-device intelligence for robots, drones, and vision systems as physical AI adoption expands across industries and markets.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
OpenAI says Jalapeño cuts latency up to 3.6x, targeting the bottleneck that slows agents
OpenAI said its first custom inference chip, Jalapeño, delivered faster responses and better power efficiency than competing systems in tests across several large language models. The findings could matter for global users, as cheaper, lower-latency AI infrastructure may help expand access, improve reliability, and support more capable agents worldwide.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
Xiaomi launches Xring O3 SoC, yet its low adoption limits threat to MediaTek, Qualcomm
Xiaomi officially unveiled its next-generation in-house system-on-chip (SoC), the Xring O3, at its Xring Chip Technology Briefing on August 24, continuing to position the silicon as an AI flagship SoC.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
Samsung, Intel widen AI chip battle into memory, packaging
Samsung Electronics and Intel are pushing into each other's core businesses as AI semiconductor competition shifts from individual chips to full-system integration. South Korean reports cited by Counterpoint Research said Samsung is using high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to strengthen its foundry business, while Intel is expanding from logic chips and foundry services into memory through advanced packaging and system-level technologies.
Wednesday 26 August 2026
Waymo's 320 million-km milestone exposes the next robotaxi challenge: scaling the silicon
As robotaxi services expand beyond individual cities into wider regions, the growing appeal of AI-assisted driving and the technological vision that AV developers are eager to realize have raised industry expectations for the economic viability of full autonomy.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Nexperia China rebuilds 12-inch local supply chain after 330 days
Nexperia China said it has rebuilt a domestic 12-inch wafer supply chain after 330 days of overseas wafer supply disruptions, unveiling the new platform at a press conference outlining its new direction. The company said complete China-based manufacturing supply chains have now been established for metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) and logic IC products.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Anthropic bets on in-house chips, reshaping ASIC orders
Anthropic confirmed on August 5 that it is building an internal silicon team to design custom chips for its Claude models, signaling a sharper push into self-developed AI hardware. The move is set to influence the company's compute procurement plans and could reshape order shares among ASIC vendors.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
AI boom drives Foxconn past 40% of Taiwan-listed firms' China returns, with FII leading the way
Global demand for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) has lifted investment returns for Taiwan-listed companies in China, with Foxconn continuing to lead the pack. According to CRIF, Foxconn's total China investment returns in the first half of 2026 reached NT$117.6 billion (US$3.7 billion).
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Vera Rubin transition gap eases as ASIC, general servers rescue supply chain
As Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform enters deployment, Taiwan's server supply chain is finding ways to bridge the transition gap before ramping up volume production. Ongoing shipments of the existing GB series, custom ASIC server deployments led by Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and general-purpose servers are all providing revenue support to cushion the interim shortfall.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Intel pitches Diamond Rapids at Hot Chips as server CPU competition heats up
Intel pitched its next-generation Diamond Rapids Xeon at Hot Chips 2026 as the company bets that agentic AI will increase the role of general-purpose processors in AI infrastructure, even as AMD and Arm gain ground in the server CPU market. The company also detailed Crescent Island, a GPU aimed at AI inference, and Wildcat Lake for client and edge systems.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
OmniVision's CIS business slips, but machine vision and robotics surge 71%
OmniVision Group reported a sharp drop in first-half 2026 profit as weakness in consumer electronics and automotive electronics weighed on its core image sensor business, even as machine vision, robotics and edge AI emerged as faster-growing sources of revenue.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
TSMC, Intel, and Samsung battle over backside power delivery below 2nm
As competition in advanced semiconductor manufacturing moves below the 2nm node, the battleground is no longer just shrinking transistors; it has expanded to how power is delivered to the chip. With Intel, TSMC, and Samsung Electronics each betting heavily on backside power delivery, the race is entering a new phase.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
China-based Guangyu Xinchen says 3D-stacked edge AI chip has entered mass-production deployment
According to 36Kr, Shanghai Guangyu Xinchen Technology says its TC1000 series of 3D-stacked near-memory-computing AI processors has moved from silicon validation to mass-production deployment, marking a claimed acceleration in the commercialization of memory-centric computing for edge AI.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Commentary: Nvidia's 15% hike piles pressure on the AI supply chain, lifts ASIC prospects
Nvidia has reportedly notified major customers that server systems using its AI chips will rise by more than 15%, with the new pricing set to apply to models shipping from early 2027, including Grace Blackwell and the next-generation Vera Rubin platform. The move is expected to ripple through the chip and system supply chain, while industry figures say it could also lift the appeal of inference ASICs.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Novosense encoder launch highlights China's push into robot joint sensing
Chinese analog and mixed-signal chipmaker Novosense Microelectronics has introduced the NSM350x series, a Hall-based magnetic encoder designed for high-precision angular measurement in robot joints and industrial motion-control systems, reports Sina Finance.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Infineon buys India-based C2i Semiconductors to bolster AI data center power systems
Infineon Technologies has agreed to acquire Bangalore-based C2i Semiconductors, a move that strengthens its position in power delivery for AI data centers and highlights India's growing role in chip design. The deal could shape how global operators manage rising energy demand, efficiency pressures, and next-generation computing workloads.
Tuesday 25 August 2026
Nvidia Groq 3 LPX enters full production for faster agentic AI inference

Nvidia said its Groq 3 LPX inference accelerator is now in full production, a move that could speed up agentic AI systems used worldwide for coding, reasoning, and other tasks. The company said the platform is designed to improve responsiveness, lower latency, and support growing demand for real-time AI applications.

Tuesday 25 August 2026
SpaceXAI to use Nvidia Vera CPUs for faster agentic AI at scale

SpaceXAI plans to deploy Nvidia's new Vera CPUs to speed up agentic AI workloads, a move that could influence how advanced AI systems are built and run worldwide. The partnership also extends toward orbital computing, signaling a broader shift in where future AI infrastructure may be located.

Tuesday 25 August 2026
IBM unveils dual-architecture mainframe chip to run Arm, z/OS, Linux workloads

In an August 24 press release, IBM announced that it is developing the first dual-architecture mainframe processor, a move that could let global enterprises run Arm-native and IBM workloads on the same future systems. The milestone may broaden software choices, accelerate AI adoption, and reshape mission-critical computing for banks, governments, and large cloud operators worldwide.