Taiwan's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has launched two research programs targeting silicon photonics (SiPh) and next-generation AI data center power systems, seeking to address energy and performance bottlenecks as high-speed computing shifts increasingly from copper to optical interconnects.

Qualcomm announced on September 24 that it has renewed its global patent licensing agreement with Apple, with the new contract set to take effect on April 1, 2027. The terms and value of the deal were not disclosed, but Apple's long-running move toward in-house modem chips continues to draw close attention.

Skyworks Solutions (Nasdaq: SWKS) has completed its combination with Qorvo, creating a US-based supplier of high-performance radio frequency (RF), power management, and analog and mixed-signal semiconductors. The company expects annual cost synergies of US$500 million or more, and says the deal will add to non-GAAP earnings per share right away.

Qualcomm and Arm opened a five-day trial in US federal court in Delaware on October 5, with Qualcomm seeking to stop paying Arm royalties for up to five years, a remedy potentially worth billions of dollars. The dispute comes as Qualcomm pushes deeper into data centers, raising the stakes of a licensing relationship largely formed around the smartphone market.

Correction, Oct. 6, 2026: An earlier version of this story, citing Bloomberg, reported that Qualcomm had agreed to license patents related to Huawei's LogicFolding technology. Qualcomm said on Oct. 6 that assertions linking the agreement to LogicFolding are not accurate. The story has been revised throughout.

Despite intense technology competition between the US and China, cooperation between the two sides on the open-standard RISC-V architecture continues to deepen, with US intellectual property provider MIPS expanding its work with Chinese industry.

Samsung Electronics has reportedly begun front-end wafer mass production of its next-generation Exynos 2700 mobile application processor, with production volume planned at more than 10% above that of the Exynos 2600 as the company prepares to expand use of its in-house chips across the Galaxy S27 lineup.

Japan's Kyushu Semiconductor Industry Exhibition, known as K-Semi, grew 36% at this year's edition in Fukuoka, held from September 30 to October 1, 2026, as chip makers expanded their presence in Kyushu. The event also added a semiconductor design zone for the first time and was held alongside the debut Kyushu Next-Generation Energy Exhibition, or K-Ene.

Researchers in Taiwan are intensifying efforts to turn 2D semiconductor materials from basic science into practical applications, with a series of studies published in Nature. The latest work, published in the October 1 issue of the leading scientific journal, follows another Nature paper published on July 1, 2026, underscoring the push in Taiwan's academia to speed up research in next-generation semiconductors.

Huawei is increasingly framing its semiconductor strategy around a simple constraint: if advanced process nodes remain limited, more performance must come from architecture, interconnect and system-level efficiency.

The resilience of global goods trade amid tariff escalation and an energy shock is real, but it rests on a narrow base. A breakdown of ITC Trade Map export data shows that a handful of AI hardware categories, led by servers, processors and memory chips, account for well over a third of the growth in world exports, and that the gains are flowing overwhelmingly to a small group of East Asian exporters and their North American customers.

Recent reports citing Anthropic's IPO filings show that Broadcom has agreed to provide up to US$42 billion in convertible-note financing to help fund the AI company's infrastructure spending, with Anthropic expected to become Broadcom's largest compute customer in 2027.

Days after reports emerged that TSMC was reassessing plans for a wafer fab in Texas, Tim Culpan, a former Bloomberg columnist and founder of independent media outlet Culpium, disclosed that the chipmaker is in discussions with Elon Musk's Terafab over potential cooperation.

Across the week, Taiwan-linked semiconductor groups and their partners continued expanding capacity, while AI demand, export controls, and financing structures shaped the industry outlook. ASML's push to raise EUV output comes as Musk and Huang warn China may narrow the lithography gap by 2030. TSMC is also tied to Texas, Singapore, and Tesla projects, while ASE added test capacity. Meanwhile, a US smuggling case and Broadcom's Anthropic financing highlight growing geopolitical and financial risk.

As AI develops rapidly across both cloud and edge environments, major chipmakers are devoting less attention to chip specifications and more to system-level design and ecosystems. For IC design leaders, moving into the system layer has become a key factor for upgrading in the AI era, because simply supplying chips is no longer enough to stay competitive in AI product lines.

While ASML executives explore how to scale extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography output beyond 110 units by 2028, China is pursuing indigenous advanced lithography systems. ASML plans to produce at least 80 EUV tools in 2027 and is investigating a further capacity increase of approximately 30% in 2028 to satisfy massive global capital expenditure in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. However, the prospect of domestic Chinese tools raises long-term uncertainty over the lithography landscape.

Biren Technology is preparing its next-generation GPU for mass production, advancing a domestic AI accelerator roadmap built around broader low-precision support and locally available manufacturing.

MediaTek announced on September 30 that its flagship Dimensity 9500 chip powers Samsung's new Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra and Galaxy Tab S12+ tablets. The deal continues a long-running partnership between the two companies across Samsung's Galaxy Tab line.

Supercomputer maker Bull will double its production capacity using an expanded factory that reopened on October 1. The French creator of Europe's fastest supercomputers described unprecedented orders as the continent seeks to catch up to the US and China in AI infrastructure.

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.

A China-backed leasing firm appears to have helped Chinese companies buy restricted Nvidia Blackwell platform chips through financial leasing, according to a recent report. The transactions involved 32 Asus servers equipped with B300 chips, highlighting how US export controls face circumvention risks through finance and supply-chain channels.

To address chip talent shortages, Taiwan has a law in place to promote industry-academia collaboration by establishing semiconductor schools. However, the current financing scheme jointly supported by the National Development Fund (NDF) and contracted companies is deemed insufficient to meet the needs of the semiconductor schools, so the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has now promised extra subsidies.

When the underlying economics of infrastructure commitments meet the financing muscle of the companies supplying foundational compute, the traditional boundary between supplier and customer begins to blur.

National Taiwan University's Graduate School of Advanced Technology (GSAT) has expanded its semiconductor research capabilities with new process and measurement equipment, strengthening links among universities, industry, and international partners as Taiwan seeks to maintain its edge in an increasingly competitive AI-driven semiconductor sector.