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Tuesday 12 May 2026
AI drives IC price hikes, lifts China chip exports 83.7% in April
Global investment in AI computing power is continuing to boost semiconductor demand, and China's chip exports are surging in tandem. Data from China's General Administration of Customs show that China's IC export value rose 100.1% year-over-year in April 2026, marking the first time it has doubled and reflecting how price hikes in AI servers, data centers, and memory are spreading rapidly through the IC supply chain.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
Trade talks to test US-China leverage on rare earths, tariffs, and AI
US President Donald Trump is set to travel to China this week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping for trade talks. The meeting comes at a time when both powers are grappling with technological competition, trade tensions, and the Middle East conflict. Many observers are not expecting a transformative outcome, but rather a continuation of small gestures to tamp down a trade war that erupted last year.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
PC chip demand stays murky in 2H26 as pre-buying clocks key
Demand for PC, notebook, and other IT application chips in the first half of 2026 remains relatively strong, driven not only by memory and CPU shortages and price increases, but also by solid pull-in demand for peripheral chips. Many industry players say the current buying momentum is stronger than in a typical seasonal low and reflects customers' expectations that component costs will keep rising. By past patterns, inventory digestion would usually emerge in the second half, but chipmakers now cannot say for sure whether customer orders will see a major correction.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
Samsung labor dispute rattles global supply chain
Samsung Electronics' escalating labor dispute has sparked global supply-chain concerns, with Apple and HP said to be warning they could exit the company's ecosystem. Suppliers, industry groups, and clients are now assessing contingency measures as mediation resumes, with potentially wide-ranging implications for production schedules, procurement stability, investor confidence, and the wider technology hardware market at large.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
WPG Holdings, WT Microelectronics see record April revenue on strong AI server demand
Leading IC distributors WPG Holdings and WT Microelectronics posted double-digit growth in both monthly and cumulative revenue for January to April 2026, driven by demand for data centers and AI-related servers.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
Arm's AGI CPU demand surges as supply constraints loom
Arm is preparing to expand beyond its traditional IP licensing business by introducing data center CPUs, positioning itself to compete directly with some of its own customers, including AWS, Google, and Nvidia, while maintaining rapid growth in licensing revenue driven by rising demand for AI infrastructure.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek take different paths as TSMC capacity stays tight
TSMC is facing fierce customer competition and supply shortages as demand surges for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing chips, forcing fabless chipmakers to consider limited shifts in manufacturing partners to ease constraints.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
Commentary: Musk's xAI exit shows Anthropic's AI strength
On May 6, Elon Musk was in several places at once: confronting OpenAI in court, announcing on X that xAI would no longer operate as an independent company, and handing over a large share of his AI compute to another AI firm, Anthropic. Three years after Musk gathered 12 researchers from DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI to found xAI with the stated goal to "understand the universe," he has now moved to shut it down.
Tuesday 12 May 2026
Interview: Cyient Semiconductors CEO on Kinetic acquisition — why power is the new compute bottleneck
As the semiconductor industry grapples with the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence, Cyient Semiconductors is repositioning itself away from being a primarily semiconductor engineering and ASIC services provider and toward a more product-oriented hybrid model centered on intelligent power and proprietary semiconductor products.
Monday 11 May 2026
For India's chip dream, Lam Research points beyond fabs
As India's semiconductor ambitions move from policy announcements to execution, Lam Research sees the country's opportunity extending beyond fabs to the less visible ecosystem that will determine whether it can become a meaningful part of the global chip manufacturing supply chain.
Monday 11 May 2026
DIGITIMES Insight: MediaTek denies Intel link as TSMC's packaging lead faces new test

DIGITIMES senior analyst Luke Lin said Warren Buffett's investment in Apple should be viewed not simply as a stock trade, but as a bet on the company and its leadership under CEO Tim Cook.

Monday 11 May 2026
Weekly news roundup: Taiwan freezes trading in MediaTek; 2D NAND shortage spirals
Below are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories from the week of May 4-10, 2026:
Monday 11 May 2026
Taiwan chip testing firm sheds power unit, pivots to AI validation as margins recover
Taiwan-based electronics verification and analysis specialist Integrated Service Technology (iST) posted weaker first-quarter revenue and an operating loss amid a major operational restructuring, but said the transition has laid the groundwork for a sharper focus on higher-margin AI-related validation and analysis services.
Monday 11 May 2026
Nvidia backs IREN in 5GW AI infrastructure push tied to US$2.1 billion stake
Nvidia is expanding its influence beyond AI chips and deeper into the infrastructure layer underpinning the global artificial intelligence boom, announcing a strategic partnership with AI cloud and data center operator IREN to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of AI infrastructure globally.
Monday 11 May 2026
Samsung eyes Exynos 2700 as test for chip-unit recovery
Samsung Electronics is looking to the tentatively named Exynos 2700 application processor (AP) as a key test for its non-memory semiconductor recovery, with the chip's adoption rate and performance in the Galaxy S27 series expected to shape the outlook for its System LSI and foundry businesses.
Saturday 9 May 2026
Global semiconductor market faces shortages as AI demand strains supply chains

Since the second half of 2025, the global semiconductor industry has been squeezed by a rare convergence of forces: surging artificial intelligence (AI) demand, escalating geopolitical fragmentation, and persistent supply chain constraints. The result, industry executives say, is a form of "silicon inflation" and a structural shortage cycle that extends far beyond a typical downturn.

Friday 8 May 2026
US president considers inviting Nvidia and other CEOs to China trade talks
CEOs from Nvidia and other American tech companies are among those that the US government plans to invite to join President Donald Trump's visit to China next week. Along with the trade negotiations, the US leader has also sought to frame the summit as a type of high-level trade delegation, although the White House is reportedly considering inviting only a small number of executives.
Friday 8 May 2026
Analysis: Anthropic's xAI deal puts Musk's GPU efficiency problem in focus

Elon Musk's latest move to team up with Anthropic in a major computing-capacity agreement captures the logic of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The deal gives Anthropic access to SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, with more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, potentially easing near-term capacity constraints for Claude.

Friday 8 May 2026
Inside Nvidia's high-stakes bet on next-generation AI cooling

One of the most closely watched developments in the AI server industry in recent weeks has been reported changes to the cooling architecture of Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, a shift that has already triggered sharp swings among related suppliers in Taiwan's equity market.

Friday 8 May 2026
Samsung chiefs address pay talks as strike deadline nears
Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman and Device Solutions (DS) head Jun Young-Hyun, along with Device eXperience (DX) head Roh Tae-moon, issued a joint statement to all employees on the progress of wage negotiations on May 7, marking their first public remarks on the talks. The move comes as Samsung tries to defuse labor tensions ahead of a union strike deadline.
Friday 8 May 2026
Taiwan firms' US investment tops forecasts; government lines up US$50 billion financing
The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) announced on May 6 that, excluding TSMC, about 20 Taiwan companies plan to invest US$35 billion in the US. The statement comes after US President Donald Trump issued reciprocal tariffs in April 2025, which unexpectedly helped speed up long-stalled progress on a Taiwan-US economic and trade agreement.
Friday 8 May 2026
Commentary: Trump-Xi Summit puts Taiwan's chip industry at center of global politics

US President Donald Trump is expected to visit Beijing on May 14-15 for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. If the trip proceeds as planned, it would mark Trump's first visit to Beijing since returning to the White House and the most consequential meeting between the two leaders since the escalation of the US-China technology war reshaped the global economy.

Friday 8 May 2026
M31 weathers project delays as royalties and advanced-node demand signal recovery
M31 Technology reported a first-quarter 2026 revenue decline as contract timing disruptions pushed some North American advanced-process projects into the next quarter, but the company said royalties and resumed project activity should underpin a rebound in the second quarter and beyond.
Friday 8 May 2026
Samsung reportedly testing 1.4nm Exynos 2800 with 96MB cache

Samsung is reportedly testing a next-generation Exynos processor that could push the company's chip ambitions beyond smartphones, with early specifications pointing to a 1.4nm-class design, a 10-core CPU, a large 96MB system-level cache, and a possible PC variant aimed at Google's Chromebook ecosystem.

Friday 8 May 2026
Anpec plans midyear 15% price hike to protect PMIC margins
Taiwan power management IC (PMIC) maker Anpec Electronics recently said its 2026 growth momentum will mainly rely on demand in non-PC applications to offset declines in PC-related business, while more meaningful expansion is not expected until 2027. The company also said rising wafer packaging and testing costs will drive a price increase of its products by up to 15% in June-July to preserve gross margins.