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Jan 14
TSMC turns Arizona gamble into goldmine as suppliers ride 10-year wave
After five years of struggling with double construction timelines and billion-dollar regulatory hurdles, TSMC has quietly transformed its Arizona operations into a profit engine, and suppliers are reaping the benefits. Taiwan's fab equipment and materials giants now have order visibility stretching beyond 2030.
Electronics manufacturing services major Foxconn and India's HCL Group have formally named their semiconductor joint venture India Chip Private Limited, according to a regulatory filing made on January 14, marking a key step in operationalising their collaboration in India's chip ecosystem, according to PTI and the Economic Times.

The global memory industry is confronting a growing capacity crunch, one that is increasingly rippling upstream to a shortage of glass fiber cloth, an obscure but indispensable material in advanced semiconductor packaging.

On January 14, US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation invoking Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to impose an immediate 25% tariff on a narrow category of advanced semiconductors, citing national security risks from heavy US reliance on foreign chip supply chains.

The global memory industry entered a clear upturn in the second half of 2025 as both spot and contract prices rose sharply, lifting earnings across Taiwan's memory supply chain and pushing operating performance to cyclical highs in the fourth quarter.

As global governments accelerate investments in the semiconductor sector, Japan's Rapidus is moving forward with its goal of mass-producing 2nm AI chips. The company maintains that its primary concern is not a potential surplus of capacity, but rather structural constraints, specifically a significant shortage of skilled professionals.

China has tightened export controls on rare earths and other dual-use materials bound for Japan, prompting Tokyo to formalise a rare-earth stockpiling policy and work with G7 partners to accelerate efforts to reduce supply-chain dependence on China.
After navigating a turbulent year of US-China tariffs, Taiwanese microcontroller (MCU) maker Holtek Corp. closed 2025 with a full-year revenue of NT$3.058 billion (US$96 million), up 22.2% from the previous year. The company said it sees growth opportunities in behind-the-meter energy storage and lithium battery fire-safety solutions, with plans to roll out medium- and small-power portable storage units for the residential market, as well as compact energy-storage fire-safety products already validated with multiple clients.
WUS Printed Circuit (Kunshan) Co. plans to invest up to US$300 million in a high-density optical-electrical printed circuit board (PCB) project aimed at supporting next-generation packaging and interconnect requirements for AI servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and advanced networking systems.
GlobalWafers stated it is continuing to expand the application landscape of its advanced materials technologies, with its Danish subsidiary Topsil GlobalWafers ramping up investment in ultra-high purity float zone (FZ) silicon materials to support the development of next-generation quantum applications.

GlobalFoundries said on January 13 that it has agreed to acquire the ARC Processor IP Solutions business from Synopsys, a move that modestly broadens the foundry's exposure to processor IP and so-called "physical AI" workloads.

TSMC will hold its earnings call on January 15, 2026. Supply chain sources expect AI chip demand to remain strong in 2026, while TSMC's advanced packaging and testing capacity continues to run short. As a result, outsourced backend orders are set to increase, with Taiwan's two major IC testing and packaging firms — ASE Holdings and KYEC — emerging as key beneficiaries.