Elon Musk has moved to quell uncertainty over Intel's position in the Terafab chip project, stressing that his companies will build and operate the planned semiconductor complex themselves while limiting any potential TSMC involvement to subleasing part of the site.
Largan chairman Adam Lin spoke about the company's cautious smartphone outlook while taking a more aggressive stance on co-packaged optics (CPO) during a recent online earnings briefing. His comments on order trends, gross margins, and 2026 visibility highlight three simultaneous pressures facing the smartphone camera-lens industry.
AI data centers are shifting toward faster networking architectures, with optical transceivers advancing from 800G and 1.6T toward 3.2T. Yet China's ability to retain its position in the global AI data center supply chain may increasingly depend on more than technology and manufacturing capacity. Potential US supply-chain restrictions are emerging as another critical variable.
AI is changing the logic of telecom traffic growth, with Ericsson and industry researchers warning that mobile networks must now handle not only more data, but also more uplink traffic, real-time interaction, and connected-on-the-move usage. As generative AI, agentic AI, and multimodal interactions spread, telecom operators are being pushed to rethink network investment beyond downlink capacity.
As the demand for green energy surges in parallel with order volumes and production capacity, scheduling for energy storage systems has become a critical technology to solve the problem of excess power for major tech firms, according to Kelsey Kuan, general manager of HD Renewable Energy subsidiary Star Trade. In an interview with DIGITIMES, Kuan also highlighted the rising technological barriers for electricity sellers, as the business now requires AI forecasting, transfer matching, energy storage, and integrated renewable-energy capabilities.
The European enterprise networking market has cleared its multi-year inventory digestion period. According to CONTEXT, sell-through via European distribution channels is growing in the low double digits entering 2026 across core infrastructure categories, including switches and enterprise wireless access points. That contrasts with the "heavy double-digit declines" the channel saw during COVID-19, said CONTEXT principal analyst Aaron Smith.
Largan Precision will hold its earnings call on October 8, when the optical lens maker is due to report third-quarter results and outline its fourth-quarter outlook. With September revenue recovering and the company stepping up property acquisitions, investors are likely to focus on three issues: progress in co-packaged optics (CPO), capacity expansion and the pace of fourth-quarter customer orders.
Demand for agentic AI in commercial and consumer markets was rising rapidly, and the market appeal of consumer services such as Meta Muse was expanding. In agentic AI tasks, large language model (LLM) inference was mainly handled by GPUs or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), while many other functions relied on CPUs, which was expected to boost CPU demand. Consumer-facing harness applications were expected to adopt enhanced general-purpose servers, while enterprise core automation would use high-density CPU racks deployed inside AI data centers.
The ferocious push toward artificial intelligence is gathering momentum amid growing industry demand for higher AI inference and increasingly compute-intensive models.
The recent summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded without progress on automotive issues—namely, whether Chinese automakers might enter the US market or build manufacturing plants on American soil. While the prospect had previously sparked anxiety among American, European, and Japanese carmakers, the topic yielded no tangible breakthrough during the talks.
China's National Day holidays have opened one of the fourth quarter's most important promotional windows for consumer electronics. For smartphones, the timing is especially significant: Apple, Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo and Honor have all launched new models since September, while Huawei introduced its Mate 90 series on October 1.
As Elon Musk's Terafab ambitions advance, the realities of modern silicon manufacturing become increasingly apparent, prompting Musk to enter talks with industry mainstays like Intel and TSMC for assistance.
Singapore is building a semiconductor R&D hub by attracting both multinational investment and overseas research talent. Dr Yu-chieh Chien, a Taiwanese scientist at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Institute of Microelectronics (A*STAR IME), is one example.
As the number of AI computing transistors integrated within a single CoWoS package rises rapidly, DIGITIMES observes that moving massive volumes of data to compute chips fast enough is becoming increasingly critical to fully utilizing available computing power.
This excerpt from DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin's podcast looks at TSMC's rumored Texas expansion, Intel's 14A and 18A process debate, and Qualcomm's high bandwidth compute (HBC) push as AI workloads drive demand for hybrid bonding and advanced packaging.
