China's new energy vehicle (NEV) supply chain has risen rapidly, with an operating model that differs sharply from the century-old mainstream automakers in Europe, the US, Japan, and South Korea. A quality issue triggered by GAC Aion's use of CALB's LFP batteries has revived discussions of its past disputes with CATL. Across the industry, the long-running tug of war between Chinese automakers and dominant battery suppliers has continued to deepen the low-margin, even loss-making, dilemma facing carmakers.
As the global electric vehicle (EV) market enters a growth adjustment phase, the auto industry is shifting from "electrification" toward "intelligence," while AI agents move rapidly from the cloud to end devices. Qualcomm says the end devices with which future AI agents will mainly interact include about 6 billion smartphones, 2 billion AI wearables, 2 billion PCs, and 500 million connected cars, underscoring how vehicles are becoming a key gateway to AI services.
This excerpt of DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin's podcast looks at two major themes: SK Hynix's openness to building in the US and the logic behind TSMC's extra US$100 billion investment pledge.
Rapidus is treating advanced packaging as a central part of its 2nm foundry strategy, not a downstream assembly service. The Japanese chipmaker aims to connect design enablement, front-end wafer processing, chiplet integration, packaging, testing and manufacturing data through its Innovative Integration for Manufacturing (IIM-1) model.
As OpenAI extends its foundation model outward to capture every entry point, Anthropic has chosen almost the opposite path. Rather than emulate Google or Apple, Anthropic is concentrating its resources on the capabilities that only a native AI company can build, with compute still its most pressing constraint.
Wistron's opening of its D1 AI smart factory in Fort Worth, Texas, marks a new milestone for Taiwan's downstream electronics manufacturers. The plant will support the first US mass production of Nvidia GB300 compute boards, a development with far-reaching implications for Taiwan, the US and the global AI industry.
Agentic AI is rapidly gaining traction worldwide, while cloud giants and Anthropic are accelerating spending on AI infrastructure. That surge is pulling CPU demand back to the center of the industry and drawing Intel back into the AI compute supply chain.
Competition in China's AI industry is moving beyond large language models into chips, memory and computing infrastructure. CXMT's planned IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market has put renewed attention on Alibaba, the Chinese DRAM maker's largest industry investor.
Taiwan's solar manufacturers are looking beyond the island for growth as China's oversupplied solar sector keeps prices low, local approvals in Taiwan slow project rollouts, and global energy markets stay volatile. Their push highlights risks for global clean-power buyers, who still face cost pressure, grid constraints, and shifting technology priorities.
Philippe Notton has spent nearly 20 years traveling to Taiwan roughly once a month. That rhythm—born from his time at MStar Semiconductor and deepened across four companies on three continents—shaped how he thinks about building chips, building companies, and building Europe's only independent advanced CPU business.
CXMT's STAR Market IPO marks a coming-of-age moment for China's DRAM industry, but the listing is only the beginning. Having proved China can manufacture DRAM, the memory chip maker must now compete directly with Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron in the global memory market.
Apple has filed a sharp antitrust-style complaint against OpenAI, turning a once-celebrated AI partnership into a legal clash over strategy, supply chains, and future hardware control. Behind the lawsuit lies a broader contest over who will shape the next wave of AI devices, and whether the Trump administration's "America First" agenda can help both sides find common ground.
TSMC raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to US$60–64 billion during its second-quarter earnings conference, with a substantial share earmarked for the US. Although Singapore tried to attract a TSMC fab, the chipmaker ultimately chose not to commit. Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation (VIS), however, has received strong backing from TSMC for VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (VSMC), its joint venture with NXP Semiconductors. VSMC's new 12-inch foundry in Singapore is scheduled to formally open in late September. DIGITIMES was granted an exclusive early look inside the facility.
As AI moves from experimentation to deployment, enterprises in Singapore and across ASEAN are shifting their focus from cloud adoption to multicloud integration, cybersecurity, and sovereign data control. Cloudmile chief commercial officer Jeremy Heng said the next phase of AI will be defined less by model hype than by the infrastructure needed to make systems secure, flexible, and commercially useful.
