China's lithium battery industry is shifting from an era of aggressive capacity expansion toward consolidation, as regulators rapidly clear deals aimed at revitalizing existing assets and closing gaps across the supply chain. The unconditional approval of six recent transactions involving batteries, energy storage, and new-energy materials — including one cleared in just 10 days — signals that Beijing sees mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as an increasingly important tool for restructuring an industry squeezed by overcapacity and price wars.
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 26 declaring a national emergency over the security of America's electrical grid. It restricts the purchase, import, and installation of certain foreign-made "bulk-power system" equipment on cybersecurity and national-security grounds.
Chinese AI startup MiniMax Group reported a 283.1% increase in revenue, rising from US$30.4 million for the six months ended June 30, 2025, to US$116.6 million for the six months ended June 30, 2026. This growth was primarily driven by the continued expansion of its global user base, surging demand for model inference, and the company's ability to translate model advancements into commercial products and services for global enterprises, developers, and individual users.
Rebellions is pursuing deployment of more than 100 NPU-based computing racks in the UK through a partnership with British AI infrastructure startup Callosum, giving the South Korean chipmaker a potential entry point into Europe's emerging sovereign computing market.
At Sustainability Environment Asia Conference 2026, Suhaimi Mansor, deputy chief executive of the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) Malaysia, delivered a clear mandate for the nation's built environment: sustainability must transition from simple assessment to measurable, lifecycle-wide performance across buildings and infrastructure.
The current aerospace landscape is increasingly marked by a push into satellite connectivity and space-based infrastructure, as SpaceX daringly edges deeper into the more intricate layers underpinning the construction of a proprietary space economy.
Southeast Asia's EV market is expected to reach US$23.58 billion by 2031, with a 2026-2031 CAGR of 31.55%. But Malaysia's charging infrastructure is falling well behind government targets, creating an opening for Chinese hardware suppliers.
As high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stack counts continue to rise, the industry originally anticipated that hybrid bonding (HB), a next-generation packaging solution, would be officially introduced with HBM5. However, process control challenges and cost barriers are threatening to delay that timeline. Simultaneously, thermal management is emerging as the central bottleneck for the memory sector.
Hybrid and plug-in hybrid demand continues to grow across ASEAN, with Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand posting the strongest sales gains. The shift is drawing local Southeast Asian automakers and Chinese brands into a tougher fight for share.
Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) has officially kicked off its STAR Market IPO process. In the first quarter of 2026, China's largest 3D NAND Flash manufacturer delivered an impressive performance, generating CNY47.042 billion (approx. US$7 billion) in revenue and CNY33.379 billion (approx. US$5 billion) in net profit attributable to the parent company. Remarkably, its profit in a single quarter eclipsed its cumulative net earnings from prior years. This has turned YMTC's CNY33 billion (approx. US$4.9 billion) fundraising plan into one of the most anticipated semiconductor IPO in China since ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT).
Kioxia Holdings is weighing construction of a new manufacturing building at its Kitakami plant in northern Japan, as rising NAND demand pushes the memory maker toward its next phase of capacity expansion beyond 2029.
Hon Hai Technology Group, better known as Foxconn, is expanding its global manufacturing footprint through new land acquisitions, factory development, and capacity upgrades as demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure accelerates and electronics supply chains become more geographically distributed.
The years-long tug-of-war between the US and China has witnessed a head-on showdown over technological might, as stringent export controls and tightening restrictions continue to push the world's two largest economies into increasingly tense competition across critical technology infrastructure.
Nvidia said in its fiscal 2027 second-quarter results on the 27th that it sold a small number of H200 artificial intelligence (AI) processors to Chinese customers last quarter, marking its first renewed AI chip sales to China since shipping about US$60 million of H20 chips in early 2025. But shipments fell short of the total approved by US President Donald Trump and licenses cleared by the US government in January, amid opposition from Beijing.
China is moving to address one of autonomous driving's most contentious and long-unresolved questions: when a Level 3 advanced automated driving system is engaged and a traffic violation or crash occurs, should the driver or the automaker bear responsibility? Beijing appears inclined to align with the classification standards set by SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineers), shifting liability to the automaker while Level 3 functions are active.
