YMTC, China's leading NAND flash producer, has unveiled a US$2.9 billion Phase III venture in Wuhan, signaling its determination to scale up capacity and sharpen its edge in next-generation memory chips. The move not only underscores Beijing's backing of a national champion but also raises the stakes in the intensifying global memory race

The global automotive market reached total sales of 44.42 million units in the first half of 2025, marking a year-over-year increase of 2.7%. Among these, the combined sales volume of the three major markets—China, the US, and Europe—totaled 27.48 million units, accounting for 61.9% of the global share, and they remain the core of the worldwide automotive industry

The Trump administration recently announced it would acquire nearly 10% of Intel's shares, becoming its largest shareholder. This move marks one of the most notable government interventions in a private company since the US government's bailout of the automotive industry during the 2008 financial crisis

US President Donald Trump's imposition of reciprocal tariffs and aggressive "Make America Great Again" measures has deepened political and economic rifts even among allies, undermining long-standing trust and reliance on the US. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit held in Tianjin, China, on September 1 brought together major powers including China, Russia, India, and Iran. This was soon followed by a grand military parade on September 3, during which the heads of state of North Korea and Russia joined Chinese leaders, in an alarming threat to global peace

Advanced packaging is rewriting the rules of the semiconductor industry. According to DIGITIMES Research, in 2024, global AI data center accelerators (covering GPUs and ASICs) have seen advanced back-end packaging costs reach US$4.1 billion, accounting for 46% of the total process cost structure—nearly matching wafer foundry costs at US$4.8 billion. This has caused the front-end process share to drop significantly to 54%, leaving only an 8% gap between the two

For Apple CEO Tim Cook, returning to the White House in early August 2025 and announcing a US$600 billion investment plan over the next four years was a strategic move that pleased President Donald Trump. Trump responded by stating that any production or factory commitments made in the US would qualify for tariff exemptions, temporarily easing Apple's larger crisis

The Trump administration's tariff policy announced in April 2025 is reshaping global server supply chains, prompting Taiwan's leading EMS firms—Foxconn, Wistron, Quanta, Inventec, and Mitac—to accelerate US expansion. Concentrating investments in Texas and California, these companies aim to localize high-margin components while navigating rising costs and tariff-driven uncertainties

China's push to localize its memory supply chain is gathering momentum. YMTC has begun trial production at its first fully localized NAND flash fab, while market chatter indicates the company is now quietly investing in DRAM. The move underscores YMTC's ambition to extend beyond NAND dominance, using its patented Xtacking technology to break into DRAM and challenge the world's top three players

In the second quarter of 2025, Southeast Asia's electric vehicle (EV) sales grew 102% year-over-year, driven by affordable battery electric vehicles, rising consumer awareness, government subsidies, and local production expansion. Chinese and Vietnamese brands like BYD and VinFast have become central forces, reshaping the regional EV ecosystem

The US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has revoked the "Validated End-User" (VEU) status for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, ending a key exemption that allowed the companies to ship equipment to their fabs in China without prior approval. The move tightens Washington's grip on the two South Korean chipmakers' operations in China, forcing future expansions and equipment upgrades through a burdensome case-by-case review

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has begun mass production and turned a profit at its Arizona plant in 2025, a milestone that marks not only a breakthrough in its global expansion but also a reversal of long-standing skepticism about America's ability to sustain advanced chip manufacturing

With global smartphone sales leveling off, Qualcomm and MediaTek are taking their long-running rivalry into the fast-growing cloud AI ASIC market. DIGITIMES Research estimates MediaTek controlled 37% of the smartphone application processor market in 2024, ahead of Qualcomm at 27%. Together, the two suppliers accounted for more than 60% of shipments. With handset growth expected to remain stuck in the low single digits, both companies are turning to cloud computing chips as a new source of expansion

The global market for high-end cloud AI accelerators is approaching a major turning point. DIGITIMES forecasts that beginning in 2026, the supply chain will enter a new "decentralized" phase shaped by three forces: the expansion of custom ASICs, diversification of advanced packaging, and intensifying competition in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) pricing

South Korea's Chosun Daily reported on September 1, 2025, that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Gyeongju in October 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) benefits many industries but is limited by the so-called "curse of dimensionality," which arises when machine learning models handle data with many features. This issue is particularly relevant in semiconductor manufacturing, where process parameters such as temperature, time, and thickness define a high-dimensional data space. Increased dimensionality exponentially expands the volume of this space, causing data points to become sparse and traditional machine learning models to struggle with capturing complex correlations