China has revised its regulations on the protection of integrated circuit (IC) layout designs, introducing stricter registration requirements, stronger enforcement measures and clearer commercialization rules as Beijing steps up efforts to strengthen its domestic semiconductor industry amid ongoing US technology restrictions.

Montage Technology has begun pilot production of what it says is the industry's first CXL 3.2 memory expansion controller, targeting growing memory capacity and pooling requirements across AI, cloud computing and data centres.

RichWave Technology said at a recent earnings call that Wi-Fi 7 adoption continues to rise rapidly, with strong demand from telecom operators and retailers. The radio frequency (RF) front-end supplier said that the second half of 2026 should be slightly better than the first half of the year overall, but warned that tight supply of memory and passive components could affect shipment timing.

ChipAgents, a two-year-old startup building autonomous AI agents for chip design and verification, has raised an additional US$60 million in Series A2 funding, taking its total Series A financing to US$134 million just six months after the round first closed.

MediaTek said at its latest earnings call that its second-generation data-center ASIC product remains on schedule for mass production in 2028, and that the Intel embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) advanced packaging process it uses has already reached a very good yield level. MediaTek also said its first-generation product remains on track for volume ramp-up in the fourth quarter of 2026 and is expected to generate US$2 billion in revenue.

For three years, the constraint on artificial intelligence was how much compute the hyperscalers wanted to buy. The June-quarter filings of seven companies say the constraint has moved. It is now about who sets the price — and on that question the past five quarters have already taught a lesson from which most readers drew the wrong conclusion.

Automotive chip sales are improving across Europe and the US, but major suppliers say global carmakers and their suppliers are still buying largely for immediate needs. A fuller inventory rebuild — one that could affect prices and supply globally — has yet to begin, leaving the recovery more cautious than expected.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (Semco) is broadening its collaboration with South Korean materials supplier SoulBrain beyond glass substrate etchants to include copper plating chemicals and chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) slurries, as the companies race to secure key materials for next-generation AI chip packaging.

Intel has granted stealth chip startup RosaicLabs access to parts of its Atom processor technology, potentially including register-transfer level code that would allow the company to develop customised x86-based chips.

AI demand is tightening semiconductor capacity beyond TSMC's advanced nodes, with mature-process foundries and backend packaging providers raising prices as supply constraints spread across the industry.