Nvidia outlined its role in advancing two major manufacturing trends—AI Factory and Physical AI—at SEMICON Korea 2026, emphasizing that it views South Korea as an important strategic outpost for collaboration as the country accelerates AI-driven industrial transformation

Artificial intelligence-driven growth in the semiconductor industry has drawn increasing public attention. SEMICON Korea, organized by SEMI, continues to expand in scale. The 2026 exhibition featured 550 participating companies and more than 2,400 booths, with pre-registered attendance reaching 75,000

As China emerges as a major RISC-V hub shipping hundreds of billions of chips annually since 2024, Arm Holdings confronts heightened competition in a market where its architecture has powered over 300 billion chips across hundreds of licensees over 40 years. The trend is prompting Arm to accelerate efforts to secure its position in China's AI era

A Citi analyst said the next phase of artificial intelligence (AI) memory demand will extend beyond high-bandwidth memory (HBM), pointing to emerging opportunities in physical AI devices and high-capacity flash architectures

Industry analysts indicate that Samsung Electronics' non-memory division is expected to return to profitability in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a full-year turnaround projected for 2027

TSMC raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to US$52-56 billion, driving strong demand in the global semiconductor supply chain amid AI growth. Memory giants SK Hynix, Micron, Nanya Technology, and Winbond also expanded capacity plans

SK Hynix has started placing initial equipment orders to convert an idle Cheongju fab into a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging and testing line, according to ET News, citing sources

As the European Union-China trade dispute over battery electric vehicles (BEVs) drags on, the EU is on track to replace punitive tariffs of up to 35% with a "minimum price commitment" mechanism starting in January 2026. Volkswagen Group has become the first automaker to formally engage with the new approach, applying the pricing scheme to its Cupra Tavascan model produced in Anhui, China—an early indication of how European manufacturers may adapt to the EU's evolving trade defense strategy

SEMICON Korea 2026, held in Seoul from February 11–13, brought senior executives from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to outline their AI-era memory R&D strategies. Samsung focused on cross-domain semiconductor integration to address bandwidth and energy-efficiency limits, while SK Hynix detailed a platform-based and AI-driven approach to compress development cycles

Lenovo said surging memory prices are likely to weigh on global PC and smartphone unit demand in 2026, prompting the company to double down on diversified sourcing, premium product mix and dynamic pricing to protect margins, even as AI becomes its fastest-growing revenue engine

Generative AI is crossing a critical threshold, shifting from an assistive tool to a system capable of directly assuming work. Early in 2026, this shift became visible almost simultaneously in Silicon Valley and Hangzhou. In the US, Anthropic enabled executable plug-ins for Claude, turning large language models into task-orchestrating AI agents and jolting the software industry. In China, a Hangzhou-based AI startup triggered a parallel shift by pushing AI directly into corporate accounting and displacing manual bookkeeping workflows

Driven by expanding memory demand from AI servers and rising average selling prices, Japan-based NAND flash and SSD maker Kioxia expects solid growth in fiscal year 2025 (April 2025-March 2026), supported by momentum in the final quarter (January-March 2026)