DIGITIMES Semiconductors: IC design, distribution news

Home Tech Semiconductors IC design, distribution

Friday 2 October 2026

Samsung's Galaxy Tab S12 taps MediaTek Dimensity 9500 as 2nm successor arrives

MediaTek announced on September 30 that its flagship Dimensity 9500 chip powers Samsung's new Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra and Galaxy Tab S12+ tablets. The deal continues a long-running partnership between the two companies across Samsung's Galaxy Tab line.

Friday 2 October 2026

Bull's France factory doubles capacity to capture growing orders as EU pushes AI sovereignty

Supercomputer maker Bull will double its production capacity using an expanded factory that reopened on October 1. The French creator of Europe's fastest supercomputers described unprecedented orders as the continent seeks to catch up to the US and China in AI infrastructure.

Friday 2 October 2026

AMD bets on AI demand by buying World Labs

Under Lisa Su's 12-year tenure at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the company has gradually moved beyond its role as Intel's challenger in the CPU market. But in the accelerator market for training and running AI models, old rival Nvidia still holds the upper hand.

Friday 2 October 2026

China financing chain linked to Nvidia Blackwell chips, 32 Asus servers exposed

A China-backed leasing firm appears to have helped Chinese companies buy restricted Nvidia Blackwell platform chips through financial leasing, according to a recent report. The transactions involved 32 Asus servers equipped with B300 chips, highlighting how US export controls face circumvention risks through finance and supply-chain channels.

Friday 2 October 2026

Taiwan government backs 7 semiconductor schools to upgrade equipment

To address chip talent shortages, Taiwan has a law in place to promote industry-academia collaboration by establishing semiconductor schools. However, the current financing scheme jointly supported by the National Development Fund (NDF) and contracted companies is deemed insufficient to meet the needs of the semiconductor schools, so the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has now promised extra subsidies.

Friday 2 October 2026

Commentary: Broadcom's US$42 billion Anthropic loan exposes AI's emerging chip-financing loop

When the underlying economics of infrastructure commitments meet the financing muscle of the companies supplying foundational compute, the traditional boundary between supplier and customer begins to blur.

Friday 2 October 2026

China chip talent tensions surface in Cambricon's US$4.15 billion ex-CTO dispute

Cambricon Technologies' equity dispute with former deputy general manager and chief technology officer Liang Jun has escalated sharply, with Liang raising his compensation claim from CNY4.29 billion (US$640 million) to CNY27.83 billion. The Chinese AI chipmaker said on September 30 that the revised claim, more than five times the original amount, has turned the case into one of the most closely watched executive departure disputes in China's semiconductor sector.

Friday 2 October 2026

TSMC, NTU deepen R&D ties through nearly 50 projects a year

National Taiwan University's Graduate School of Advanced Technology (GSAT) has expanded its semiconductor research capabilities with new process and measurement equipment, strengthening links among universities, industry, and international partners as Taiwan seeks to maintain its edge in an increasingly competitive AI-driven semiconductor sector.

Friday 2 October 2026

Hygon, Sugon deepen integration under one chairman after US$17.3B merger collapse

Chinese AI chipmaker Hygon Information Technology has appointed Jun Li as its new chairman following a recent board reshuffle. Li only took over as chairman of Chinese server maker Dawning Information Industry (Sugon) in May 2026, meaning he now chairs both listed companies.

Friday 2 October 2026

Onsemi revises Synaptics takeover deal after rival bid

Onsemi has amended its agreement to buy Synaptics in an all-cash deal, a move that could reshape semiconductor competition and affect global technology supply chains. The revised cash transaction offers Synaptics shareholders value certainty, while regulators, customers, and investors now await decisions that may influence AI, sensing, and connected-compute markets worldwide.

Friday 2 October 2026

CSPs embrace multi-vendor co-design for custom ASICs, ending single-supplier era

Hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) are expanding their custom ASIC partner networks, accelerating a shift toward multi-vendor technology integration. Industry insiders note that the era of a single design partner handling an ASIC project end-to-end is largely over, replaced by a co-design model where vendors compete for functional silicon footprint within single-chip architectures.

Friday 2 October 2026

Commentary: AMD challenges Nvidia in embodied AI as Lisa Su acquires Fei-Fei Li's World Labs

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to acquire World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately US$8.2 billion. Following the closing, World Labs will operate as a dedicated frontier research organization for large language models (LLMs) and spatial intelligence, with founder Fei-Fei Li joining AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Chair and CEO Lisa Su.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Ascend now ahead of Nvidia in China, with domestic supply driving AI chip substitution, says Huawei chairman

Huawei rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company's Ascend AI accelerators have surpassed Nvidia in both sales and market share in China, highlighting how US export controls on advanced AI chips are accelerating the shift of China's data center and AI industries toward domestic suppliers.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Meta's Muse lifts server CPU demand, with AMD EPYC orders extending into 2028

Meta's rapid rollout of its Muse AI agent is emerging as an early test of how agentic AI could reshape server infrastructure demand, with CPU suppliers already seeing longer lead times and AMD's latest EPYC processors reportedly booked deep into 2027.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Synopsys and Amazon sign US$1 billion-plus deal to speed custom chip development

Synopsys announced a strategic agreement with Amazon on September 30, a multi-year deal valued at more than US$1 billion that is intended to speed up Amazon's custom silicon work and support the development of more complex AI-powered products and cloud infrastructure.

Thursday 1 October 2026

MediaTek TPU orders rise as chip capacity war intensifies

MediaTek's Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) business is still moving steadily higher, but supply-chain sources say the real limit is capacity as chipmakers and cloud service providers (CSPs) battle for semiconductor output in Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park. MediaTek has also denied market rumors that its TPU orders have slipped.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Qualcomm, Samsung redesign chip packaging as heat limits phone performance

Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics are redesigning how memory is packaged with flagship smartphone processors, as rising chip performance puts greater pressure on the limited cooling capacity of mobile devices.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Synopsys raises long-term growth and margin targets, guides fiscal 2027 revenue to US$11.15 billion

Synopsys is betting that custom silicon and AI-driven chip design will lift its growth above the double-digit pace it previously targeted. At its investor day in New York on September 30, 2026, the design software and IP company raised its long-term revenue goal to mid-teens annual growth through fiscal 2030, lifted its operating margin objective to about 50%, and issued fiscal 2027 guidance roughly two and a half months earlier than usual, anchored by a US$1 billion IP license with Amazon and a new model partnership with OpenAI.

Thursday 1 October 2026

AWS Trainium 3 shipments stall as supply chain sees turnaround

AWS's latest Trainium 3 shipments appear to be running behind expectations, but the strain reflects broader pressures that global readers will recognize across the AI hardware supply chain. Suppliers cited parts shortages, assembly complexity, and rapid demand growthas the main bottlenecks, which could affect cloud costs, capacity, and competition worldwide.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Synopsys and OpenAI to share revenue from AI model built to run chip design tools

Synopsys is betting that the surest way to keep generative AI from eroding its electronic design automation (EDA) franchise is to build the model together with the AI developer and share the proceeds. The chip design software maker said on September 30, 2026, that it has signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI to jointly develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized model optimized to operate Synopsys' EDA tools, under an arrangement that Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi told Reuters was structured so that "it will not be cannibalizing our business."

Thursday 1 October 2026

Jensen Huang wins Van Fleet Award as Nvidia, South Korea trio reunites

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the Korea Society's annual dinner in New York on September 28 local time and received the 2026 Van Fleet Award, with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won on hand to congratulate him. The appearance underscored how Nvidia's ties with South Korea's semiconductor makers have expanded from memory supply into AI manufacturing, creating a two-way relationship in products and technology.

Thursday 1 October 2026

Qualcomm says PC chip shortages are manageable; price swings hit harder

Qualcomm's senior vice president and general manager of the compute and gaming business, Kedar Kondap, said the biggest challenge facing the PC industry is not component shortages, but the unusually large price swings in memory and other parts. Speaking to the media during Snapdragon Summit 2026, he said that volatility is affecting the PC market.

Thursday 1 October 2026

ASIC shipments top GPUs in 2027 as ABF substrate bottlenecks shift

The high-end cloud AI accelerator market will see a structural shift in 2027, with total ASIC shipments surpassing GPU shipments for the first time, driven by rising output from Google, Amazon, and Huawei. The market will move into a landscape of "dual competition between Nvidia and Google, with multiple players racing to catch up."

Wednesday 30 September 2026

ASE Technology buys Singapore factory for AI chip testing expansion

ASE Technology Holding's Singapore unit has approved the purchase of a factory in Yishun Industrial Park from Dutch LED maker Lumileds Singapore for about US$68.44 million, or about NT$2.152 billion. The site is intended to support future capacity expansion.

Wednesday 30 September 2026

Jensen Huang, Lisa Su join Tsinghua University advisory board, putting AI chip leaders closer to Beijing

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su have joined the advisory board of Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management (SEM), putting two of the global AI chip industry's most prominent executives on the Beijing-based body.

More IC design, distribution coverage

BIZ FOCUS

Oct 2, 08:00

Digital Divide: Hackathon Team Debuts Senior-Friendly 'AI Butler'

MOST-READ
7 DAYS NEWS

Full list

MULTIMEDIA

K-Safety Expo 2026: Safety, rewired, AI takes the front line at the edge of Busan blue

INDUSTRY GUIDEBOOKS

Geopolitics may bring dramatic shifts in semiconductor industry