Lite-On Technology will continue increasing capital expenditure in 2027 as cloud service providers (CSPs) pour money into the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure race, president Anson Chiu said. He warned that CSPs that stop investing to secure market share will pay an even higher price for falling behind in the irreversible AI era.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with executives from Samsung Group and SK Group during a brief visit to South Korea on October 31, as tightening memory supplies and growing commitments to major AI customers raise the stakes for the company's semiconductor and data center partnerships.

Dixon Technologies is pursuing separate partnerships for servers, optical communications, and advanced semiconductor packaging as it seeks a role in AI infrastructure manufacturing, although its most ambitious silicon-photonics plans remain at the evaluation stage.

Foxconn subsidiaries Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT) and Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII) are combining their expertise in computing, connectivity, power delivery and cooling to address increasingly complex AI infrastructure demands. Speaking at Hon Hai Tech Day, their chairmen said competition has expanded beyond individual hardware specifications to overall system performance and integration.

Dixon Technologies is counting on smartphone joint ventures, expanding IT hardware production, and locally made components to turn a sharp sales increase into stronger earnings, as rising memory costs inflate revenue without a corresponding rise in manufacturing volumes.

As AI and large-scale data center buildouts drive up data transmission speeds, heat is becoming increasingly concentrated in key components. This has drawn attention to ceramic substrates and higher-performance aluminum nitride (AlN) substrates for use in optical communications and advanced packaging. Supply chain sources say, however, that metal adhesion remains a major engineering challenge, one that industry participants are reluctant to discuss publicly.

Nvidia will invest US$1 billion (KRW1.34 trillion) in South Korean internet company Naver, acquiring an approximately 4.54% stake and surpassing Naver founder and board chairman Hae-jin Lee to become its third-largest shareholder.

South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has raised US$620 million in its latest funding round, quadrupling its valuation from the previous round to US$2.9 billion and strengthening its challenge to Nvidia.

Indian consumer electronics brand Mivi has inaugurated an INR2 billion (approx. US$21.05 million) research, development, and manufacturing facility at E-City in Tukkuguda, Hyderabad, giving the audio-focused company a monthly capacity of 500,000 earbuds and 75,000 soundbars as it pushes into smartphones.

Apple is preparing to charge for heavier use of certain Apple Intelligence features from 2027, introducing usage caps for cloud-based AI services that could become part of its existing iCloud+ subscriptions. The plan, outlined on Apple's website alongside two consecutive months of product launches in 2026, adds another consideration for consumers already facing hardware upgrades and higher prices.

Meta is accelerating its humanoid robotics ambitions through a partnership with Chinese robotics company Fourier, having developed an initial prototype and begun work on a second version as it explores the potential of AI-powered household assistants.