On February 9, Synopsys' China office circulated an internal memo announcing that Qun Ge, global senior vice president and chairman and president of Synopsys China, will leave the company, a move that has prompted significant discussion within China's technology industry

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly hosted a "fried chicken and beer" meeting in Silicon Valley on February 5, 2026, with SK Group chairman Tony Choi, according to industry sources cited by Yonhap News Agency and The Hankyung. The informal dinner in Santa Clara took place at the restaurant "99 Chicken" and followed a similar high-profile gathering Huang held in Seoul in October 2025 with Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group chairman Chung Eui-sun

China-based foundry SMIC will release fourth-quarter 2025 results on February 10 and hold its first 2026 investor briefing on February 11. Market focus is expected to center on its advanced packaging push, which is shifting from a supporting function toward a core manufacturing strategy

Technological iteration is supposed to symbolize progress. Yet N-type (Tunnel Oxide Oxide Passivated Contact) TOPCon technology, which has been in commercial deployment for only about three years, is now in survival mode. Supply chain players on both sides of the Taiwan Strait point out that this crisis is no longer a simple imbalance of supply and demand figures, but rather a zeroing effect because of policy shifts, surging raw material costs, and intense technological infighting

Wingtech Technology said a dispute with Luxshare Precision over the transfer of its India business asset package has entered international arbitration, while the rest of its major asset divestment has been completed without litigation

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi secured a decisive victory in the February 8, 2026, lower house election after her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won 316 seats, surpassing the two-thirds threshold required to control parliamentary committees and initiate constitutional revisions

Global competition in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is intensifying, and SK Group is accelerating its strategic expansion. Korean media report that SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and senior SK Hynix executives recently traveled to the US to discuss cooperation with major technology companies, including Nvidia, while advancing plans for the proposed "AI Company" (tentative name)

Samsung Electronics is set to begin mass production of the world's first sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) chips later in February 2026, marking a major milestone in the race to supply critical components for next-generation AI hardware. Industry sources cited by the Yonhap News Agency say shipments could start as early as next week, following the Lunar New Year holiday, with Nvidia among the first customers

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's decisive victory in the lower house election has strengthened her government's ability to advance policies tied to economic security, bringing renewed attention to the future direction of Japan's semiconductor and defense technology agenda

The AI agent sector intensified in early 2026 as the simultaneous arrival of Anthropic's Claude Cowork and Peter Steinberger's OpenClaw catalyzed significant interest across the global technology community. While both represent a shift toward independent desktop agents, they operate on different ends of the permission spectrum. OpenClaw grants deep system-level access to files, applications, and chat histories, whereas Claude Cowork functions within secure, user-authorized boundaries to manage file organization, data processing, and document generation

To promote the formal deployment of South Korea's domestic NPU and reduce reliance on Nvidia, LG Consulting & Solutions (CNS), the IT services arm of South Korea's LG Group, has joined forces with local IC design company FuriosaAI. The two will jointly integrate FuriosaAI's second-generation RNGD NPU into LG CNS's enterprise agentic AI platform, targeting the public-sector digital transformation market

Universal Scientific Industrial (Shanghai) Co. (USI) posted higher earnings in 2025 despite a decline in revenue, reflecting improving profitability amid pricing pressure and uneven demand across key business segments

TSMC chairman C.C. Wei recently visited Japan and appeared alongside Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to jointly announce that Kumamoto Fab 2 will be upgraded from a 6nm to a 3nm process, signaling Japan's plan to reclaim its semiconductor glory. However, according to supply chain sources, when the Japanese government first invited TSMC to build fabs in Kumamoto, it had already mapped out three major strategies that included advancing advanced packaging and constructing new facilities. Most importantly, Japan aims to leverage its strengths in equipment and materials to reinforce its critical position and bargaining power in the advanced packaging industry chain