Taiwan's printed circuit board (PCB) industry is set for robust growth in 2025, supported by strong demand from AI servers amid a weakening traditional smartphone market. The Taiwan Printed Circuit Association (TPCA) highlighted that despite external uncertainties such as exchange rate fluctuations and tariff negotiations, the sector benefits from price hikes driven by tight supply of high-end materials, leading to increases in both volume and prices.

The smartphone market is expected to contract in 2026 as rising costs for memory and advanced process wafers drive manufacturers to reconsider pricing and specifications, according to research firm Counterpoint Research. The firm forecasts a 2.1% decline in smartphone shipments next year, with entry-level models anticipated to experience the sharpest drop due to heightened consumer sensitivity to price increases.

Intel has completed acceptance testing of the industry's first commercial high-NA EUV lithography system with a numerical aperture of 0.55, the ASML Twinscan EXE:5200B, laying the foundation for mass production of its 14A process node. This milestone marks the transition of high-NA EUV technology from research and development verification to high-volume manufacturing (HVM), enabling wafer throughput of 175 per hour and reinforcing Intel's efforts to reclaim leadership in advanced semiconductor processes.

As global demand for AI computing power intensifies, China's domestic GPU sector has reached a milestone. Following Moore Threads' successful IPO earlier this month, MetaX, a GPU developer with deep AMD roots, listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on December 17.

AMD CEO Lisa Su has announced plans to increase investment in China during a recent visit aimed at strengthening collaboration in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence sectors between China and the US. Su met with Chinese officials and industry leaders to underline AMD's commitment to the Chinese market.

On December 17, Rapidus announced a new suite of AI-based semiconductor design tools under its Rapidus AI-Assisted Design Solution (Raads), aimed at supporting the company's Rapid and Unified Manufacturing Service (RUMS) concept. The technology will be rebranded as Rapidus AI-Agentic Design Solution, with multiple tools scheduled for release starting in 2026. Customers will receive the tools alongside a process design kit (PDK) and reference flows.

Google has reportedly initiated the TorchTPU project to enhance support for the PyTorch machine learning framework on its tensor processing units (TPUs), aiming to challenge the software dominance of Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem. Reuters, citing insiders, said the effort focuses on lowering barriers for developers and increasing TPU adoption in cloud and enterprise settings.

imec said it has launched a strategic alignment initiative with Japan's Advanced SoC Research for Automotive (ASRA) to coordinate efforts on standardizing chiplet architectures for automotive applications, as the industry seeks to improve interoperability and reduce fragmentation in emerging chiplet ecosystems.

As AI inference workloads grow and models expand rapidly, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are advancing high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technologies while integrating processing-in-memory (PIM) capabilities. This approach allows computations to occur within memory itself, reducing data movement and easing power and performance constraints.

Niching Industrial Corp., a supplier of semiconductor packaging and testing materials, said revenue in 2025 is likely to hit a record high, driven by rising cooling demand from AI servers and high-performance computing. Packaging and testing products are expected to grow 26% year over year, while vapor chamber products are forecast to surge up to 150%, with related revenue set to multiply this year.

China has quietly crossed a psychological and potentially strategic threshold in the global semiconductor race. In a tightly controlled laboratory in Shenzhen, Chinese scientists have built a working prototype of an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, the most complex and geopolitically sensitive tool in modern chipmaking, according to Reuters.