Akamai Technologies plans to spend about US$5.5 billion building cloud infrastructure to support a US$11.6 billion, seven-year commitment from Anthropic, as the US cloud provider expands memory procurement, server hardware and distributed CPU capacity.
The US and China have brought artificial intelligence into their bilateral economic dialogue and received leader-level backing to continue talks. Still, details of an AI safety hotline described by US officials remain unclear after US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Washington.
Physical AI is accelerating like never before. Autonomous intelligent machines can walk, run, fly, swim, and assemble car parts in under a minute. New advances in AI models and technologies like dexterous hands are also pushing the boundaries of how smart and useful humanoids can be.
GMI Cloud is making Taiwan a key part of its global AI infrastructure expansion, with a US$500 million investment in an AI factory powered by Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs. Announced in late 2025, the facility is expected to deploy roughly 7,000 GPUs and serve customers including Trend Micro and Wistron.
Microsoft announced that it will invest US$10 billion in expanding AI infrastructure in the Middle East by 2030. The commitment directs funding to a region facing threats from the war in Iran, where data center construction has continued despite the ongoing conflict.
Honda Motor Co. is planning to invest JPY300 billion to JPY400 billion (about US$1.9 billion to US$2.5 billion) in a new hybrid electric vehicle plant in Ohio, with production targeted to begin as early as 2030. According to Nikkei, the project has entered final negotiations as Honda moves hybrids to the center of its North American rebound after reviewing its electric vehicle strategy.
Grab is expanding the scope of its Taiwan strategy beyond food delivery, launching an overseas expansion programme for merchants aimed at helping Taiwanese food and beverage (F&B) brands enter Southeast Asian markets.
ASRock Industrial, the industrial PC (IPC) arm of ASRock, posted a 95.4% year-over-year surge in first-half 2026 revenue after winning a major North American streaming services contract. The company is also expanding into robotics, entertainment, cybersecurity and edge computing as the IPC sector rebounds and shifts toward new applications.
LG Group is sharpening its focus on data centers, robotics, semiconductor materials, and enterprise AI as the South Korean conglomerate refines how it allocates capital across businesses moving toward commercialization at different speeds.
Semiconductor epitaxy maker Episil Precision said on September 22 that rising demand from AI data centers has created two main growth engines. Demand for silicon photonics optical communication modules is driving a surge in germanium silicon (GeSi) epitaxy demand, with the sector projected to grow 3.5- to 4-fold in 2027 and demand visibility extending to 2028.
China's AI industry is moving beyond policy-driven technological catch-up into a new phase centered on commercialization and ecosystem competition. Localization is no longer confined to replacing individual components; it is evolving towards full-stack, system-level optimization.
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