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Thursday 14 May 2026

Etron's robotics bets gain ground as memory cycle turns

Etron Technology is seeing momentum extend beyond its core memory business, as subsidiaries built over the past several years begin to bear fruit in robotics, edge computing, and privacy-focused applications.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Alibaba faces mounting margin pressure as AI investments accelerate

Analysts gave Alibaba Group Holding's latest results a cautious reception, warning that surging artificial intelligence (AI) investments are pressuring profitability even as cloud growth accelerates. While investors welcomed strong AI-related momentum and rising cloud revenue, several research firms said heavy infrastructure spending and weaker-than-expected earnings underscored the mounting costs of Alibaba's ambitious AI expansion.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Tencent eyes Chinese ASIC ramp in 2H26

Tencent Holdings Limited reported a 9% year-over-year increase in total revenue to CNY196 billion (approx. US$28.86 billion) for the first quarter of 2026, driven by a strategic pivot toward artificial intelligence (AI) and stabilized growth in its core gaming and advertising segments. Company executives highlighted the quarter as a turning point, noting "significant initial progress on our new AI products" while continuing to integrate machine learning across existing business lines.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Analysis: How OpenAI is playing the Cerebras card to reshape its AI supply chain

OpenAI's deep partnership with chipmaker Cerebras has taken a public turn as Cerebras prepares to list in the US, a development that underscores OpenAI's effort to restructure its compute supply chain without abandoning existing suppliers. The listing arrives amid OpenAI's ongoing legal dispute with Elon Musk.

Thursday 14 May 2026

MediaTek courts Intel as Google pushes for alternatives to CoWoS

MediaTek's decision to pursue advanced packaging partnerships with both TSMC's CoWoS ecosystem and Intel's EMIB platform has become one of the semiconductor industry's most closely watched strategic moves.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Lam Research to hire 1,000-plus engineers in Taiwan on AI chip demand

Lam Research said it will hire more than 1,000 professional engineers in Taiwan in 2026 as customer demand mounts and the company expands technical support services for foundry, memory and assembly and test customers.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

L&T Semiconductor Technologies signs multiyear agreement with Synopsys for AI-enabled power module design

L&T Semiconductor Technologies' multiyear agreement with Synopsys to use AI-enabled multiphysics simulation software could accelerate the development of power modules and intelligent power modules, potentially affecting global electric mobility, renewable energy, and industrial automation by improving design efficiency, reliability, and time-to-market for next-generation power electronics, and by enhancing supply-chain resilience.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Malaysia explores semiconductor listings to strengthen domestic capital markets

Malaysia is exploring ways to encourage more semiconductor-related companies to list on Bursa Malaysia as the government seeks to better align the country's capital markets with its growing role in the global chip supply chain.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

China CPU vendors seize AI inference surge as Intel, AMD supplies tighten

The global race for AI computing power continues to intensify, beyond ongoing GPU shortages. CPUs, long viewed as secondary components in servers, are once again becoming critical parts of data center infrastructure due to the rapid rise of AI inference and AI agent applications.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Taiwan's semiconductor supply chain posts broadly positive April; AI demand clearly visible across ecosystem

Of the 238 Taiwan-listed semiconductor and related companies tracked by Digitimes, 73% (173 companies) posted positive year-on-year revenue growth in April 2026, and 58% (139) grew month-over-month. Memory makers, AI server assemblers, and advanced packaging houses led the advance, while silicon wafer suppliers and a handful of fabless names faced ongoing headwinds.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Moore Threads builds China-made embodied AI stack with Lightwheel.ai

Moore Threads has entered a strategic partnership with Lightwheel Intelligent (Beijing) Technology (Lightwheel.ai) to jointly develop a domestic simulation and synthetic data infrastructure platform for embodied AI, highlighting China's broader push to reduce reliance on foreign AI computing and robotics software ecosystems.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

AI server tracker: GUC surges ahead as Faraday and Alchip face slower 2026 start

Taiwan's ASIC and design services sector is showing sharply diverging fortunes in 2026, with new monthly revenue data highlighting strong momentum for GUC while rivals Faraday and Alchip face a slower start to the year.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

AI drives IC price hikes, lifts China chip exports 83.7% in April

Global investment in AI computing power is continuing to boost semiconductor demand, and China's chip exports are surging in tandem. Data from China's General Administration of Customs show that China's IC export value rose 100.1% year-over-year in April 2026, marking the first time it has doubled and reflecting how price hikes in AI servers, data centers, and memory are spreading rapidly through the IC supply chain.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Trade talks to test US-China leverage on rare earths, tariffs, and AI

US President Donald Trump is set to travel to China this week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping for trade talks. The meeting comes at a time when both powers are grappling with technological competition, trade tensions, and the Middle East conflict. Many observers are not expecting a transformative outcome, but rather a continuation of small gestures to tamp down a trade war that erupted last year.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

PC chip demand stays murky in 2H26 as pre-buying clocks key

Demand for PC, notebook, and other IT application chips in the first half of 2026 remains relatively strong, driven not only by memory and CPU shortages and price increases, but also by solid pull-in demand for peripheral chips. Many industry players say the current buying momentum is stronger than in a typical seasonal low and reflects customers' expectations that component costs will keep rising. By past patterns, inventory digestion would usually emerge in the second half, but chipmakers now cannot say for sure whether customer orders will see a major correction.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Samsung labor dispute rattles global supply chain

Samsung Electronics' escalating labor dispute has sparked global supply-chain concerns, with Apple and HP said to be warning they could exit the company's ecosystem. Suppliers, industry groups, and clients are now assessing contingency measures as mediation resumes, with potentially wide-ranging implications for production schedules, procurement stability, investor confidence, and the wider technology hardware market at large.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

WPG Holdings, WT Microelectronics see record April revenue on strong AI server demand

Leading IC distributors WPG Holdings and WT Microelectronics posted double-digit growth in both monthly and cumulative revenue for January to April 2026, driven by demand for data centers and AI-related servers.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Arm's AGI CPU demand surges as supply constraints loom

Arm is preparing to expand beyond its traditional IP licensing business by introducing data center CPUs, positioning itself to compete directly with some of its own customers, including AWS, Google, and Nvidia, while maintaining rapid growth in licensing revenue driven by rising demand for AI infrastructure.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek take different paths as TSMC capacity stays tight

TSMC is facing fierce customer competition and supply shortages as demand surges for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing chips, forcing fabless chipmakers to consider limited shifts in manufacturing partners to ease constraints.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Commentary: Musk's xAI exit shows Anthropic's AI strength

On May 6, Elon Musk was in several places at once: confronting OpenAI in court, announcing on X that xAI would no longer operate as an independent company, and handing over a large share of his AI compute to another AI firm, Anthropic. Three years after Musk gathered 12 researchers from DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI to found xAI with the stated goal to "understand the universe," he has now moved to shut it down.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Interview: Cyient Semiconductors CEO on Kinetic acquisition — why power is the new compute bottleneck

As the semiconductor industry grapples with the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence, Cyient Semiconductors is repositioning itself away from being a primarily semiconductor engineering and ASIC services provider and toward a more product-oriented hybrid model centered on intelligent power and proprietary semiconductor products.

Monday 11 May 2026

For India's chip dream, Lam Research points beyond fabs

As India's semiconductor ambitions move from policy announcements to execution, Lam Research sees the country's opportunity extending beyond fabs to the less visible ecosystem that will determine whether it can become a meaningful part of the global chip manufacturing supply chain.

Monday 11 May 2026

DIGITIMES Insight: MediaTek denies Intel link as TSMC's packaging lead faces new test

DIGITIMES senior analyst Luke Lin said Warren Buffett's investment in Apple should be viewed not simply as a stock trade, but as a bet on the company and its leadership under CEO Tim Cook.

Monday 11 May 2026

Weekly news roundup: Taiwan freezes trading in MediaTek; 2D NAND shortage spirals

Below are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories from the week of May 4-10, 2026:

Monday 11 May 2026

Taiwan chip testing firm sheds power unit, pivots to AI validation as margins recover

Taiwan-based electronics verification and analysis specialist Integrated Service Technology (iST) posted weaker first-quarter revenue and an operating loss amid a major operational restructuring, but said the transition has laid the groundwork for a sharper focus on higher-margin AI-related validation and analysis services.

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