A new era of automated geopolitical warfare has arrived in East Asia. In its recently published "Disrupting Malicious Uses of AI" report, OpenAI reveals that Chinese state-sponsored actors have moved well beyond simple bot networks. They are now deploying artificial intelligence as a strategic "operational manager" — coordinating complex "cyber special operations" (wǎngluò tèzhàn) against Japan's leadership and Taiwan's digital sovereignty.

Nvidia's ability to sell high-performance AI chips in China has been sharply limited by US export licensing rules, which have restricted shipments of its H20 and H200 products. The controls have already forced Nvidia to take a US$4.5 billion inventory charge and have left the company uncertain about future revenue from China. Meanwhile, local competitors, some strengthened by recent IPOs, are expanding rapidly, potentially reshaping the global AI market.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission is probing the MYR1.11 billion (US$250 million) agreement with UK-based Arm Holdings amid seizures, arrests, and political fallout. The government maintains the Cabinet-approved deal is still in force, and ministers have pledged cooperation with investigators.

Nvidia's GTC 2026 will be held in mid-March. CEO Jensen Huang is expected to address concerns about an AI bubble while reaffirming that the Vera Rubin platform has entered mass production. He is also set to argue that AI computing is moving into an era of "thinking and reasoning." Three themes are likely to shape the conference.

At the latest earnings call on February 25, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said deploying data centers in space is technically feasible but currently uneconomic. However, he expects conditions to improve over time as engineering approaches evolve and space-based computing use cases expand.

At the earnings call on February 25, Nvidia detailed its next-generation Rubin platform and Vera CPU roadmap as Blackwell systems continue to ramp, with management signaling sustained demand across Hopper, Blackwell, and forthcoming products while acknowledging uncertainty around the timing and scale of Rubin revenue.

Taiwan and South Korea have long defined the frontlines of global tech rivalry. Now, that relationship is evolving into something far more nuanced. Driven by the demands of the AI supercycle and mounting geopolitical pressures, the two are settling into an uneasy but necessary "frenemy" dynamic. DIGITIMES president Colley Hwang laid out this shift in a lecture on February 24, 2026, mapping the hidden vulnerabilities and emerging interdependencies that will shape both nations' tech futures. His analysis, centered on TSMC and Samsung, is clear: the era of pure head-to-head competition is over. Collaboration is now a strategic imperative.

Nvidia said uncertainty over China shipments and tight product supply remain key constraints, even as generative AI drives record capital spending by hyperscalers and sovereign customers accelerate national AI infrastructure investments.

During the earnings call on February 25, Nvidia said record capex plans by major cloud service providers reflect a structural shift toward monetizable AI workloads, with management arguing that token-driven revenue models support continued elevated infrastructure investment.

On February 25, Nvidia's blowout fourth-quarter results and bullish fiscal-2027 guidancehelped dispel recent market worries that the AI spending boom may be an unsustainable bubble, as the company reported record sales and signaled continued rapid demand for data‑center compute.

Blowout earnings from TSMC in 2025 — and an even more bullish outlook for 2026 — have reignited investor enthusiasm across the global semiconductor sector. Attention is now turning to Nvidia, whose latest quarterly results are widely expected to surpass already lofty forecasts.

China IC design firm Rockchip is facing an open-source licensing dispute after GitHub reportedly froze code repositories linked to its projects, drawing attention across the semiconductor and software industries to open-source compliance risks.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Meta have entered into a multi-year agreement to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs to power Meta's next-generation AI data centers, marking one of the largest AI infrastructure partnerships to date and potentially exceeding US$100 billion in value.

Texas Instruments (TI) has raised analog chip prices in 2025, prompting several US and European peers to follow suit with similar increases.

Nvidia's high-performance GPUs sit at the heart of the US-China AI chip standoff — and Washington's export controls mean every policy shift lands directly on its order book. Two months after the Trump administration signaled it would allow limited H200 sales to China, not a single chip has been approved, a senior US export enforcement official has confirmed.

Intel has opted for a multi-year collaboration and minority investment in SambaNova Systems rather than a full acquisition, signaling a more capital-disciplined approach as it seeks to strengthen its position in the fast-growing AI inference market.

Texas Instruments (TI) has provided a revenue guidance range of US$4.32 billion to US$4.68 billion for the first quarter of 2026. This outlook reflects significantly stronger seasonality than usual, with revenue typically ranging from a low-single-digit decline to flat. Analysts noted that this sequential growth guidance marks what appears to be the first of its kind for the company in roughly 15 years. Earnings per share for the same period are expected to range from US$1.22 to US$1.48.

Texas Instruments reported mixed results for the fourth quarter of 2025, with year-on-year growth supported by industrial and data center demand but sequential declines across most markets, underscoring uneven recovery trends and lingering demand uncertainty.

Texas Instruments is approaching the end of a six-year capex expansion after spending US$4.6 billion in 2025, and plans to cut 2026 investment to US$2 billion–US$3 billion as its Sherman fab ramps ahead of schedule, while monitoring indirect demand shifts tied to volatility in memory markets.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has amplified recruitment of South Korean semiconductor talent via social media, deepening competition for engineers as global tech firms increasingly target the country's skilled workforce.

Cerebras Systems has confidentially filed for a US initial public offering for a second time, as the AI chip designer seeks to capitalize on surging demand for high-performance computing infrastructure and a landmark supply agreement with OpenAI.

Nvidia and Meta recently announced a multi-year strategic partnership under which Meta will procure and deploy millions of Nvidia chips. The deal covers not only the current Blackwell architecture and next-generation Rubin GPUs, but also marks the first time Meta will deploy Nvidia's Grace CPU and Vera CPU at large scale as standalone products. Nvidia has also now begun supplying CPUs independently, signaling that the shift toward Arm architecture in data centers is accelerating; bad news for Intel.

Just ahead of the launch of Nvidia's next-generation GPU Vera Rubin, market sources indicate that the company will differentiate high-bandwidth memory (HBM) suppliers based on product performance tiers. Analysts suggest that Samsung Electronics may exclusively supply the sixth-generation HBM4 used in the highest-end products.