U-Best Innovative Technology, a unit of Sun Yad Group, is accelerating development of fluorine-free coatings to capture replacement demand driven by EU and US state-level regulations restricting the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other "forever chemicals." The company is targeting high-end applications in foldable phones, semiconductors, and displays, with product launches expected in the first quarter of 2027 at the earliest.

Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio are becoming unlikely fixtures in AI infrastructure. OpenAI has reportedly bought tens of thousands of the desktops for reinforcement learning and is seeking more, while Anthropic is renting Mac minis through Amazon Web Services, according to The Information. The systems are being used partly to train computer-use agents that operate software, test code and complete multi-step digital tasks.

Unimicron, a major Taiwanese IC substrate maker, came under intense supply chain scrutiny last week after reports that prosecutors and investigators searched the company over a suspected "origin washing" case. The move has put long-standing cross-border production arrangements in Taiwan's electronics sector under sharper review.

Chip design company Agentrys announced last week that it raised US$24.5 million in funding from backers including MediaTek. It is one among an emerging crop of startups using agentic tools to power the design of semiconductors, a step in the chip process that still involves considerable amounts of time and labor.

SEMICON Taiwan 2026 kicked off its pre-show program with the Silicon Photonics Global Summit.

US restrictions on China's access to advanced computing could expand beyond physical chip shipments to the remote use of computing resources, potentially increasing compliance requirements for cloud providers and data center operators in Southeast Asia.

Tim Cook's most durable non-financial decision was to treat environmental and social performance as product attributes rather than corporate disclosure. It worked well enough that Apple's own succession announcement lists it alongside silicon and services. It also leaves John Ternus a set of commitments that get harder every year, a legal challenge to the way they are advertised, and no executive whose full-time job is to deliver them.

What Tim Cook leaves John Ternus on September 1 is best measured not by margin but by geography. Cook spent twenty-eight years concentrating Apple's manufacturing in one country, then a decade trying to make that concentration politically survivable. Both halves are unfinished, and both are now Ternus's responsibility to bear.

MetaX posted its first half-year profit since listing, with rising GPU shipments and the mass production of its C600 accelerator strengthening its commercial position while China's domestic AI chip sector increasingly splits between profitable vendors and peers still absorbing heavy R&D costs.

OpenAI announced that it will end its contract allowing its models to be used on Cursor due to the latter's acquisition by SpaceX. The development indicates the tense personal relationship between AI leaders Sam Altman and Elon Musk months after an acrimonious lawsuit between the two and as both companies pursue the lucrative enterprise market.

Asustek Computer (Asus) is accelerating its artificial intelligence (AI) transformation plan, announcing the rebranding of its AIoT Business Group into the Physical AI Solutions Business Group (PAS BG), with humanoid robots positioned as an important strategic market for the future. The move underscores the company's push beyond AI servers into agentic AI, edge AI, and physical AI under the chairman Jonney Shih's AI strategy.