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Aug 17, 16:06
TSMC overseas fabs see profit flip in 1H26

Since 2020, when TSMC began its overseas manufacturing buildout, the company has tracked financial results at its foreign subsidiaries across the first half of 2025, full-year 2025, and the first half of 2026. The Arizona fab, long seen as difficult to make profitable, has expanded sharply, while Japan's JASM has turned from loss to profit, China operations have remained stable, and Germany's ESMC is still in the red as it remains under construction.

SK keyfoundry has approved KRW90 billion (approx. US$64 million) in capital spending to expand its 8-inch foundry capacity, a rare move for a company that has long prioritized maintaining existing production lines.

Phison Electronics CEO Pua Khein-Seng said the company is seizing a once-in-a-lifetime chance to transform into a high-growth business as AI agents drive massive demand, keeping NAND Flash supply tight for many years. He said 2027 capacity constraints will be even more severe than in 2026, leaving room for further price gains, though the pace of increases will gradually narrow.
Samsung Electronics' sales to China and the US surged in the first half of 2026 as an AI-driven memory upcycle boosted its semiconductor business, while Nvidia did not rank among the company's five largest customers despite growing ties between the two companies in high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

Less than a week after LG Group and Nvidia signed a strategic memorandum of understanding (MOU), Madison Huang, Nvidia's senior director of product marketing for Omniverse and robotics, is reportedly preparing to visit South Korea and head directly to one of LG's key robotics R&D sites.

Chinese optical chipmaker Jiangsu Vertilite Semiconductor Technology is investing CNY5 billion (approx. US$741 million) in a new communications chip and device R&D and manufacturing base in Changzhou, expanding beyond VCSELs into high-end indium phosphide, or InP, laser chips for AI optical interconnects.

Samsung Electronics is reportedly considering repurposing the second line at its next-generation semiconductor R&D complex in Giheung into a foundry send-fab, a shift that would add advanced-node capacity as demand for AI memory strains leading-edge capacity.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) and LG Innotek pushed their semiconductor package substrate operations close to full capacity in the first half of 2026 as shipments of high-value substrates for AI accelerators, server CPUs, memory and data center networking climbed, company filings and earnings materials show.

Tata's leadership transition may shape the pace of one of India's biggest industrial bets. The group's planned spending on chips, clean energy, and AI data centers is entering a critical stage, but a shift toward tighter capital discipline could slow expansion and alter priorities worldwide.

WaveSplitter posted NT$477 million (US$14.95 million) in consolidated revenue in the first half of 2026, up 47% from a year earlier, and returned to profit as demand from AI data centers and the broader market lifted shipments of high-speed optical communications products. Net profit attributable to the parent company reached NT$6.16 million, compared with a loss in the same period of 2025, while earnings per share came to NT$0.19.

The Trump administration is pressing Apple to find alternatives to Chinese memory suppliers as the company weighs ways to navigate a global memory shortage that has sharply increased component costs, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Hermes Testing Solutions (HTSI), a semiconductor testing solutions provider, stated that continued growth in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), coupled with capacity expansion by major global foundries and packaging and testing companies, has driven demand growth across its three main businesses: probe cards and cleaning materials, testing equipment engineering services, and semiconductor equipment and customized products.