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Friday 14 August 2026
Nvidia Feynman pushes TSMC A16 and CPO ramp

Nvidia is accelerating development and supply-chain alignment for its Feynman generation in the second half of 2028, even as Vera Rubin enters mass production and ramps up. The move is set to drive upgrades at TSMC and could trigger another wave of orders across the global equipment and materials supply chain.

Friday 14 August 2026
Intel's US$20B equity raise puts Lip-Bu Tan's turnaround strategy to the test

Intel has priced the largest equity raise in its history, selling 210,526,315 shares of common stock at US$95 per share to raise roughly US$19.67 billion in net proceeds, according to a prospectus supplement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Friday 14 August 2026
Lam Research to spend more than US$3 billion expanding global R&D labs
Lam Research plans to invest more than US$3 billion over the next five years to expand its global research and development lab network, increasing experimental capacity as semiconductor manufacturing grows more complex.
Friday 14 August 2026
Samsung Electro-Mechanics glass substrate plan slips, with mass production now seen after 2028
Samsung Electro-Mechanics has again delayed its semiconductor glass substrate commercialization schedule after a prototype reportedly failed a customer's reliability review. The setback has pushed back the construction timetable for GlaSSEM, its joint venture with Dongwoo Fine-Chem for glass core production in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and has made equipment ordering dates difficult to pin down.
Friday 14 August 2026
Taiwan tech dividend expansion to accelerate non-tech industry upgrades
Taiwan is seeking to sign an agreement with the US to avoid double taxation, seen as the last major hurdle to unlocking Taiwanese investment in the US. Taiwan's technology dividend is believed to not only support overseas investment but also accelerate the transformation of its domestic non-tech industries.
Friday 14 August 2026
SMIC plans to single out AI chip revenue as demand outpaces its current reporting categories
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) is considering disclosing revenue from artificial intelligence (AI)-related "peripheral chips" as a standalone line item, possibly from the third quarter of 2026 or later, executives said on the company's second-quarter earnings call.
Friday 14 August 2026
Applied Materials sets 2028 capacity target as it commits new manufacturing hires
Applied Materials used its fiscal third-quarter earnings call to lay out a multi-year capacity build rather than just a strong quarter. Alongside record results, the company said it is hiring and training manufacturing and customer-support staff so it can double its quarterly system output from current levels by 2028, and is already planning a further capacity expansion to support demand growth "by 2030," according to CFO Brice Hill on the August 13, 2026 call.
Friday 14 August 2026
Hua Hong's fabs were already full — price is what finally made them profitable
Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor has been running its fabs flat out for more than a year without earning an operating profit on the work. The June quarter ended that. Revenue reached a record US$717.5 million, up 26.8% from a year earlier and 8.6% sequentially, and gross margin widened to 16.5% from 10.9% in the same quarter of 2025 — enough, for the first time in five quarters, to cover operating costs rather than merely offset them.
Friday 14 August 2026
SMIC's pricing power arrives as AI pushes mature-node work into China
China's largest contract chipmaker has spent most of the past two years increasing volume without much to show for it in terms of margins. The June quarter broke that pattern. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) reported revenue of US$3.01 billion for the three months ended June 30, 2026, up 20.0% sequentially and 36.1% from a year earlier, and gross margin of 25.3% against 20.1% in the March quarter. The margin, not the revenue line, is the news: it is the first quarter in this cycle in which SMIC has been able to convert a full order book into price.
Friday 14 August 2026
Musk hints at FEL light source for Terafab; ASML eyes FEL-EUV push
After EVs, rockets, and humanoid robots, Elon Musk appears to be turning his attention to optimizing the chip manufacturing process. When he unveiled a US$16.8 billion initial investment for the giant wafer fab Terafab, he also showed a concept image of the facility after completion.
Friday 14 August 2026
Samsung chip design embraces AI, but loss of control and hallucinations remain a problem
The AI wave is sweeping through the chip industry, but hallucinations, loss of control, and cybersecurity risks remain unresolved even as efficiency leaps. Youngsik Kim, head of the Design Technology (DT) team at Samsung Electronics' System LSI division, has pointed out that software has already leveraged AI to cut headcount and generate significant gains, but hardware has yet to see clear benefits.
Friday 14 August 2026
Cerebras raises 2026 outlook as hardware sales weaken
AI chip startup Cerebras Systems raised its full-year 2026 core revenue and gross margin outlook after reporting second-quarter results, but the company also disclosed declining hardware sales and a sharp swing in profitability metrics. The update came as investors focused on whether growth was shifting away from hardware and toward cloud services.
Friday 14 August 2026
SK Hynix advances Yongin fab construction for 2027 cleanroom launch
SK hynix has pushed construction of its semiconductor campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, to 87% completion as it targets February 2027 for the start of operations at its first cleanroom. Power and water supplies have already been secured, according to Maeil Business Newspaper.
Friday 14 August 2026
Rapidus targets 8-reticle interposers by 2030
Rapidus expects interposers for high-performance chips to reach eight-reticle scale by around 2030, as larger chiplets and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) push advanced packages toward sizes that are increasingly inefficient to manufacture on conventional 300mm wafers.
Friday 14 August 2026
Samsung and SK hynix push AI deeper into fabs as semiconductor manufacturing enters autonomous era
As the world enters an AI-powered era where the persistent need for more complex architectures is driven by rising demands for higher computing performance, one bottleneck confronting the semiconductor industry lies not only in technological advancement itself, but also in the capacity to deploy standardized manufacturing processes at greater scale and speed.
Friday 14 August 2026
ABF substrate boom lifts Eternal Precision prices 20%

Strong Ajinomoto Build-Up Film (ABF) substrate demand has driven a surge in orders for vacuum laminating equipment, with Eternal Precision Mechanics, a unit of Eternal Materials, saying customer orders and inquiries jumped sharply around Christmas 2025 and have continued since. Its Japan plant has been running at full capacity since May this year.

Friday 14 August 2026
Beyond silicon and copper: OCP APAC looks under the hood of future AI infrastructure
AI's appetite for compute is growing at such speeds that simply building bigger versions of today's data centers may no longer cut it.
Friday 14 August 2026
Korea's CNT pellicle race heats up as aweXome Ray pushes toward EUV commercialization
As South Korea's major memory manufacturers race to secure next-generation lithography technologies for increasingly advanced process nodes, the approaching High-NA EUV era is adding urgency to the development of pellicles capable of handling higher optical and thermal requirements.
Friday 14 August 2026
Grand Process's Challentech partners with Japan's Seiki for bonding tech

Artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) continue to drive demand for advanced packaging, where bonding technology has emerged as a crucial next-stage process amid rapid advances in chip stacking, heterogeneous integration, and backside power delivery.

Thursday 13 August 2026
Taiwan's packaging and integration ecosystem positions it as the backbone of CPO scaling, Ayar Labs says

The technical feasibility of co-packaged optics (CPO) has been demonstrated repeatedly at major industry conferences in recent years. At the 2026 OCP APAC Summit, however, Ayar Labs CEO Mark Wade shifted the focus from whether CPO works to whether it can scale commercially.

Thursday 13 August 2026
Samsung delays High-NA EUV adoption until 1nm production in 2030
Samsung Electronics plans to introduce high-numerical-aperture extreme ultraviolet (High-NA EUV) lithography into mass production at its 1nm node around 2030, according to South Korean media reports. The move signals that the foundry giant is continuing work to deploy the next-generation chipmaking technology at advanced nodes.
Thursday 13 August 2026
LandMark Optoelectronics posts surge in profit on silicon photonics demand
LandMark Optoelectronics Corp. reported a sharp jump in revenue, margins, and profit in the second quarter of 2026, driven by strong demand for silicon photonics products and higher shipment volumes. The optical communications epitaxial wafer maker also said third-quarter 2026 revenue is expected to rise more than 20% quarter-on-quarter as both the company and its downstream foundry partners expand capacity.
Thursday 13 August 2026
SK Hynix expands EUV roadmap with High-NA tools and PSM adoption
SK hynix said it is advancing its use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for the mass production of next-generation DRAM, with high-numerical-aperture (High-NA) EUV equipment introduced in the second half of 2025 and related research and development beginning in 2026. The memory maker is also adopting phase-shift mask (PSM) technology and other process materials to improve EUV performance as demand rises for higher-capacity, higher-performance chips.
Thursday 13 August 2026
LX Semicon starts mass producing automotive MCU for Hyundai Motor, Kia
LX Semicon has begun mass production of an automotive microcontroller unit (MCU) and started supplying the chip to Hyundai Motor and Kia, marking the first time the two automakers will use a South Korean-made MCU in vehicles. The move also marks LX Semicon's first mass-production achievement in automotive MCUs, expanding its business beyond the display driver ICs for which it is best known.
Thursday 13 August 2026
OCP APAC 2026: Ayar Labs CEO says copper is holding back open compute, sees optical interconnects as way forward
Speaking at the OCP APAC Summit 2026, Ayar Labs CEO Mark Wade argued that copper interconnects have become one of the biggest obstacles to realizing the vision of open computing.