China's intelligent driving market is advancing rapidly, but the true trial has only just begun for domestic smart driving chipmakers.

China's power battery industry has reported robust growth through the first seven months of 2026, driven by rising demand across both electric vehicles and stationary energy storage applications. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China (MIIT), cumulative sales of power batteries reached 790.4 gigawatt-hours (GWh) between January and July, representing a 37.1% year-over-year increase.

SK Hynix is accelerating its shift to sixth-generation 10nm-class 1c DRAM, with the process expected to account for roughly 34% of its DRAM production by the fourth quarter as the company prepares for HBM4E and seeks greater cost efficiency.

China's Naura Technology has demonstrated a selective etching process for 64-layer 3D DRAM structures, potentially giving domestic memory makers another route to raise transistor density while access to advanced EUV lithography remains restricted.

India is selling its semiconductor build-out abroad as a hedge against an over-concentrated supply chain. The officials running it are unusually candid that the hedge cannot be built without the country it hedges against. Asked at a media briefing in Taipei on 4 September how New Delhi views the role of Chinese companies in India's chip and electronics supply chain, S. Krishnan, secretary of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, opened with a line that would be politically awkward in most capitals: "We need to be realistic."

Huawei is using measured data from its upcoming Kirin 2026 processor to challenge a key concern around vertically stacked logic: that higher transistor density inevitably brings more heat.

Revenue rose at every Chinese chip company examined in the first half of 2026 amid the domestic-substitution push, but the interim filings show three quite different businesses hiding under one label. One has reached real scale and is now funding its expansion from the balance sheet rather than from operations. One is repairing its margins on a genuinely homegrown instruction set at a fraction of the scale. And the cohort's most spectacular profit number is not a processor story at all.

The most consequential safety technologies are often judged by what happens after something goes wrong: how fast an alarm sounds, how quickly rescuers arrive, or how effectively protective equipment limits injury.

The BEST OF K-SAFETY EXPO Global Media Awards on September 3 offered a revealing snapshot of where safety technology is heading: away from passive protection and toward systems that can sense danger, interpret it, and increasingly act before humans intervene.

South Korea's Hanmi Semiconductor has reportedly begun supplying 2.5D packaging bonders to an unnamed Taiwanese foundry after the equipment passed mass-production qualification, giving the company an important production foothold as Taiwan's advanced-packaging supply chain expands beyond foundry-owned lines.

Not every safety breakthrough spotted across the K-Safety Expo 2026 floor in Busan came with an AI camera attached.

South Korea's safety-tech sector may be increasingly filled with AI cameras, robots, drones, and predictive systems, but BEXCO general manager Tom Choi argues that the force pushing many of those technologies toward actual deployment begins somewhere less glamorous: government policy.

Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee and SK Group Chairman Tae-won Chey are traveling to New York at the end of September 2026 to meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang again as Washington presses South Korean companies to expand US investment. The planned trip is drawing market attention because Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are already pursuing large-scale spending in the US and could discuss further business ties on the sidelines of the event.

"Demo is not a product," Jingwei Hirain president Chengjian Fan told DIGITIMES in an interview, arguing that China's new-energy vehicle industry has learned hard lessons as fast-moving startups, deep in-house development, and tougher supplier scrutiny reshape the market. He said software demand has increased more than tenfold compared with the internal combustion engine era, while the fastest mass-production delivery cycle in China has been as short as 12 months.