World Labs, the startup founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled Atlas, a multimodal world model designed to generate, reconstruct, and simulate three-dimensional environments from text, images, and video. The launch marks a shift from conventional generative AI toward systems that reason about geometry, camera position, depth, and spatial relationships.
Niching Industrial is expanding its heat-spreader capacity as AI and high-performance computing demand pushes up orders across the global semiconductor supply chain. The company said larger stamping equipment, tighter plating control, and future liquid-cooling technologies are being developed to support chips that generate more heat in data centers worldwide.
Sustainability is not just good for communities and the environment but also good for business. This is the message from a sustainability summit that took place at SEMICON Taiwan this week, with water management and equipment providers seeking to link water recycling, tool upgrades, and efficiency-improving automation to measurable cost savings.
Ligitek is accelerating its move from LED packaging into silicon photonics (SiPh) and high-speed optical communications, with 1.6T product samples already tested and volume-production equipment due from late 2026 through the first quarter of 2027. Chairman I-hsin Tung said recent optical throughput tests exceeded industry benchmarks, with revenue contribution expected in the second half of 2027.
Zeiss is expanding its Taiwan presence as artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates demand for smaller chips, vertical stacking, and 2.5D and 3D heterogeneous integration. The shift is increasing the need for metrology, inspection, and failure analysis, and Zeiss is planning a semiconductor innovation center in northern Taiwan to support validation and application development.
Samsung Electronics launched its new Galaxy Z series foldable smartphones, including its first wide-folding model, kicking off this year's foldable smartphone battle. With attention on the upcoming release of Apple's debut foldable smartphone, the market reported on September 2 that Xiaomi and Huawei will unveil new foldables on September 7, ahead of Apple.
Solomon Technology, a Taiwanese artificial intelligence (AI) 3D vision company, is showcasing two key inspection applications that integrate its core AI vision and optical technologies at Semicon Taiwan 2026. The applications include full-wafer warpage detection inside front-opening unified pods (FOUP)/cassettes and through-glass via (TGV) aperture defect inspection technology, aimed at preventing equipment downtime during manufacturing processes and ensuring the yield and quality of next-generation advanced packaging.
AUO Group's AET Corporation (AET), formed in September 2025 through the merger of AUO Envirotech and AUO Digitech, is expanding across the semiconductor supply chain and has reportedly entered the ecosystem of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). After the merger, AET's core operations turned profitable in 2025, and the company is targeting a full-year profit in 2026.
Taiwanese compound semiconductor maker WIN Semiconductors said on September 1, 2026, that compound semiconductors are the backbone of AI and satellite communications, as it unveiled 0.1μm GaN technology aimed at higher-speed transmission. Senior associate vice president Chuck Huang made the remarks at the NExT Forum.
As AI chips grow more powerful, the race is shifting beyond transistor scaling to packaging, glass substrates, and thermal control. For global readers, that means the next gains in AI performance may depend as much on manufacturing breakthroughs as on chip design, with supply chains and costs likely to change.
Google will expand its AI infrastructure research and development center in Taipei's Shilin district, adding 60% more office space, as it deepens work with Taiwan's supply chain on next-generation computing. The move underscores Taiwan's growing role in global AI development, where chip, cooling, and data-center advances affect users worldwide.
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