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Friday 30 January 2026

Alibaba, Baidu advance IPO plans for AI chip subsidiaries

China's two largest technology companies, Alibaba and Baidu, have launched initial public offering (IPO) processes for their semiconductor design subsidiaries, a move widely seen as part of Beijing's broader push to strengthen domestic chip self-sufficiency and secure local AI computing capacity under tightening US technology restrictions.

Friday 30 January 2026

US-China rivalry enters next phase: Nvidia's H200 chips get Beijing's nod

Recent reports from mainland China indicate that authorities have approved the import of an initial batch of Nvidia's H200 chips. The move highlights yet another turn in the intensifying US–China technology rivalry.

Friday 30 January 2026

Aspeed profits rise for second year on server upgrade demand

As artificial intelligence (AI) applications expand, the rising scale and density of server computing have placed a premium on system stability. AI servers, characterized by high costs, extreme power consumption and significant heat generation, face the risk of substantial losses from system outages. This has heightened the importance of baseboard management controllers (BMCs), which provide real-time monitoring of voltage, temperature and system status, driving steady growth in Aspeed Technology's operating performance.

Friday 30 January 2026

Taiwan pledges equal incentives for US investors under new MOU, with no cap on subsidies

Taiwan is stepping up efforts to anchor global investment at home, offering equal incentives to US and foreign firms even as cross-border commitments under the Taiwan–US Investment Cooperation MOU remain asymmetric.

Friday 30 January 2026

Realtek expects networking to drive growth in 2026 amid PC market challenges

Realtek Semiconductor outlined its outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2026 during its January 27, 2026, earnings call, highlighting networking applications as the key growth driver amid ongoing challenges in the PC market. The company anticipates robust demand and specification upgrades in networking, particularly driven by AI developments and the adoption of Wi-Fi 7.

Friday 30 January 2026

Realtek poised for growth in automotive Ethernet, AI, and consumer electronics sectors

Realtek is projecting a stronger financial performance in 2026, driven by its expanding automotive Ethernet products, AI applications, and established consumer electronics lines. The semiconductor company recently confirmed its SSD controller chips are part of Nvidia's silicon photonics switch supply chain, signaling deeper industry integration.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Jensen Huang clarifies 40% Taiwan chip capacity is new, not moved to US

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrived in Taiwan on the afternoon of January 29, 2026, addressing reports that the US government plans to shift 40% of Taiwan's semiconductor capacity to the United States.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Jensen Huang hints at H200 approval for China, cements TSMC’s central role

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrived in Taiwan at noon on January 28 following a visit to China for a subsidiary's year-end event, where he outlined the latest status of H200 export approvals and detailed Nvidia's foundry strategy.

Thursday 29 January 2026

A year of transformation: Tesla pivots to Robotaxis and domestic chip production

Tesla is entering what executives describe as a "turning point" year. As the company pushes forward with robotaxi deployment and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology, it must also navigate potential bottlenecks in global semiconductor supply that could define its medium-term growth.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Alibaba's new AI chip challenges Nvidia from A800 to A100-class performance

Alibaba has unveiled its in-house high-end AI processor, Zhenwu 810E, advancing its strategy to vertically integrate AI chips, cloud infrastructure, and large language models. Developed by T-Head Semiconductor, the processor appeared on Alibaba's website on January 29, 2026, following an earlier mention on CCTV News, highlighting Alibaba's vertically integrated AI supercomputing framework that combines in-house chips, Alibaba Cloud's computing platform, and the open-source Qwen large language models from Tongyi Lab.

Thursday 29 January 2026

China's MCU sector trends from price cutting to margin repair

China's microcontroller (MCU) vendors have started raising prices, led by Cmsemicon's increases across MCU and related products, marking the first upward move in a market that has been depressed for years.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Cmsemicon triggers MCU, NOR Flash price hikes of up to 50% in widening China chip cost cycle

Chinese microcontroller (MCU) supplier Cmsemicon has raised prices on its MCU and NOR Flash products by 15% to 50%, citing tighter chip supply and higher packaging and testing costs. The company said the adjustment is part of a broader price increase cycle across China's semiconductor sector in early 2026, which began with AI processors and memory products and has since extended to wafer fabrication, backend services, and upstream materials and components.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Tesla bets future on custom chips as profit plunges 64%

Tesla's latest earnings showed softer vehicle demand but improving margins, while management and analysts focused on the company's accelerating investments in custom chips, AI compute, and robotics as key to sustaining growth across its automotive, autonomy, and energy businesses.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Realtek tops US$3.8 billion in 2025 revenue, signals solid growth from customer restocking in 1H26

Realtek said at its January 28, 2026, earnings call that fourth-quarter 2025 revenue reached NT$26.28 billion (US$840 million), down 10.9% from the previous quarter and 0.3% from a year earlier. Gross margin declined to 48.1%, down 1.6 percentage points quarter over quarter and 0.3 percentage points year over year. Operating profit fell to NT$2.34 billion, down 25% sequentially and 18.9% annually.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Taiwan and Germany expand trade ties as demand for chips and green tech rises

As demand accelerates for digital transformation, energy transition, and smart manufacturing, Taiwan and Germany appear poised to expand cooperation across a widening range of industries, including semiconductors, advanced machinery, green technologies, and applied innovation.

Thursday 29 January 2026

How Sega's US$5 million lifeline saved Nvidia from collapse

In a recent interview with Jodi Shelton, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, reflected on a life spent in near-constant motion. After years of crisscrossing the globe, he said, there are three places where he always lands with a sense of joy: Hawaii, Taiwan, and Japan.

Thursday 29 January 2026

China advances system-level datacenter design through PCIe 6.x, CXL 3.x interconnect

In recent years, data center development has focused on boosting the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and other compute processors. As computing scale continues to expand, the incremental benefits of single-chip performance improvements are declining. The core challenge is now how to efficiently coordinate and scale large pools of computing resources across system-level architectures.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Column: How chip value spillover is redefining Taiwan's economic and industrial trajectory

I describe the close integration of Taiwan's semiconductor and electronics industries as the spillover of chip economic value. In earlier phases of the industry, economic value creation in electronic systems was highly concentrated at the chip level. Advancing process nodes alone was sufficient to capture most of the value. That model no longer holds. Today, improvements in manufacturing technology must propagate beyond wafer fabrication to packaging, testing, and ultimately system-level integration to translate into tradable economic value.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

Phison's Pascari SSDs power world's first lunar data center, set new reliability benchmark

Taiwan's leading NAND controller and storage solution provider, Phison Electronics Corp., recently announced that its enterprise SSD brand Pascari has partnered with US space data company Lonestar Data Holdings on the award-winning Freedom Mission, a milestone project highlighting the rising strategic importance of secure and resilient data storage in the AI era.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

MetaX revenue more than doubles to US$230 million as losses narrow

China's GPU developer MetaX reported strong revenue growth for fiscal 2025, driven by rising demand for domestically produced AI chips. In a preliminary earnings release on January 27, 2026, the Shanghai-based company said revenue is expected to reach CNY1.6 billion (US$230 million) to CNY1.7 billion, up from CNY743 million a year earlier, a year-over-year increase of 115% to 129%.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

Beijing greenlights Nvidia H200 shipments to ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent

China has approved purchases of Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chips by ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

TI outlook points to tentative recovery as cash flow strength offsets profit pressure

Texas Instruments' (TI) latest results and guidance suggest a cautious rebound in demand, particularly in industrial and automotive markets, even as profits remain under pressure. Analysts say resilient cash flow and constructive capital allocation help steady investor sentiment amid an uneven recovery.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

Lightmatter leverages Taiwan ecosystem to bridge the gap between photonics prototypes and production

Lightmatter is hosting its Tech Day in Taiwan on January 28, 2026, following the announcement of strategic partnerships with Global Unichip Corp. (GUC), Cadence Design Systems, and Synopsys. The company is positioning itself to advance AI infrastructure and accelerate the commercialization of co‑packaged optics (CPO) solutions.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

KGD joins memory price rally with China vendor raising prices by up to 80%

A fresh wave of memory price hikes is sweeping across the semiconductor supply chain, spreading from AI memory products into manufacturing, packaging, and testing, and upstream materials and critical components. Known Good Die (KGD), long a low-profile yet tightly linked segment of the ecosystem, is now emerging as a key pressure point in the latest pricing surge.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

MediaTek partners with Google, targets US$10 billion ASIC business by 2027

MediaTek's performance in ASICs has been the center of market interest as it continues to heavily invest in Taiwan and North America to break into the cloud AI market. Rumors have risen that the ASIC business could potentially be worth US$10 billion by 2027.

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