To safeguard national security and the development of the AI supply chain, the US has banned imports of advanced humanoid robots. Against that backdrop, Taiwan-based Swancor unveiled its first "Taiwan AI robot ecosystem" at Automation Taipei 2026, joining with more than 10 Taiwanese industry, technology, and academic partners to showcase applications ranging from smart inspection and public safety to smart construction, AI education platforms, commercial interaction, and long-term care companionship.
South Korean AI infrastructure provider Elice Group is expanding on two fronts, adding enterprise AI transformation (AX) solutions while building what it says will be the country's first AI data center to use warm-water cooling above 40°C.
China shipped more than 40,000 humanoid robots in the first half of 2026, lifting its share of global shipments to 97%, according to a development report released on August 20 at the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing. The figure marked the highest share ever recorded in the report's historical data and underscored China's growing role in the global humanoid robot supply chain.
Quartz component leader TXC is targeting AI and automotive applications as demand grows for faster data transmission, with 1.6T optical modules expected to see explosive growth in the second half of 2026. The company aims to lift AI revenue to 20% by the end of 2026, with roughly 20-30% of that coming from optical module applications.
The inference economy has arrived, and Taiwan's tech industry must transition from the "knowledge economy" to the "inference economy," DIGITIMES chairman Colley Hwang said on August 20 at a forum exploring future trends in the semiconductor industry. He also warned that Taiwan's AI data center capacity is about one-sixth of South Korea's.
China consumer electronics ODMs are extending their R&D, supply chain integration and mass production capabilities into the embodied AI robot market. Longcheer announced on August 19 that it had signed an agreement with the Nanchang High-tech Zone in Jiangxi, officially establishing an embodied AI robot R&D and manufacturing base. The company said it will build end-to-end capabilities from product definition and R&D design to engineering delivery, offering ODM solutions for embodied AI products.
As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, shifting bottlenecks reflect the maturity of the AI boom. Initial constraints emerged at the semiconductor level with GPUs, high bandwidth memory (HBM), and advanced packaging. Next came system-level challenges around networking, power, and thermal management. More recently, infrastructure limits, including transformers, grid connections, and overall power capacity, took center stage.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) is currently one of the hottest areas of technology and product development for AI data centers. It is not only the first layer of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described as the industry's "five-layer cake," but also a concrete manifestation of the idea that computing power ultimately depends on electrical power.
The sub-sector's dominant supplier grew 37.9% year to date and still ranks only seventh of 20, while the other 19 companies grew 56.9% between them.
As subsidies for China's new energy vehicle market gradually wind down and automaker margins continue to narrow, Beijing is shifting policy support toward embodied AI and humanoid robotics. That change is encouraging Chinese automakers to redeploy technologies originally developed for smart EVs and accelerate their push into humanoid robots.
Aurotek Corporation is accelerating its push into the robotics market, unveiling its first lights-out factory solution integrating multi-brand, multi-form-factor robots at Automation Taipei.
More coverage
