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Wednesday 27 May 2026

Qualcomm and ByteDance's rumored AI ASIC deal signals potential shift in China's data center chip supply

The agreement between Qualcomm and ByteDance positions the former for large-scale AI ASIC demand from the latter, as reported by Bloomberg, but market viability remains uncertain amid intense AI chip competition, evolving China procurement preferences, and regulatory pressures affecting cross-border semiconductor adoption.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

Jensen Huang: Taiwan is center of AI revolution, with US$150 billion in capex powering local ecosystem

Nvidia held an "employee town hall" on the morning of May 27 at the T17 and T18 sites in Beitou-Shilin Technology Park (BSTP), where CEO Jensen Huang met staff, gave away Dom Pérignon, and framed Taiwan as central to the company's AI expansion. Taipei Mayor Wayne Chiang attended only as a "guest."

Wednesday 27 May 2026

China clears 9 domestic AI chips for state procurement

China has formally brought AI chips into its national security and reliability evaluation framework for the first time, marking a further expansion of the country's Information Technology Application Innovation procurement policy into AI computing infrastructure.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

Qualcomm's ByteDance deal gives smartphone chipmaker entry into AI data center market

Qualcomm has reached a deal to supply AI data center chips to ByteDance, giving the US smartphone processor designer a potentially high-volume customer as it tries to expand into AI infrastructure and custom silicon.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

China-based SmartSens, Unisoc team up on Micro LED optical interconnects for AI clusters

SmartSens and Unisoc have formed a strategic partnership to develop Micro LED high-speed optical interconnects, aiming to deliver domestic, low-power, high-bandwidth solutions for short-reach AI cluster links. The collaboration could accelerate the commercialization of Micro LED co-packaged optics (CPO) technology and strengthen China's role in global AI infrastructure supply chains, according to a press release.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

Broadcom and Taiwan's chipmakers ride ASIC wave

The world's largest chip designers are steadily growing more bullish on the future of cloud artificial intelligence (AI) chips known as ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) — a market increasingly seen as the next major battleground in the global AI boom.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

Kinpo accelerates ODM push into AI servers and EV chargers

Kinpo Electronics outlined its 2026 core strategy at a shareholders' meeting on May 25, centering on "bearing fruit" as it builds on years of product-mix adjustments, expands into AI-related products, and accelerates its shift toward an ODM model.

Wednesday 27 May 2026

Huawei Tau Law series 2: Advanced packaging, AI interconnects, EDA lead the way

Huawei's Tau Law proposal is rapidly redirecting attention across China's semiconductor industry away from pure lithography competition and toward advanced packaging, 3D stacking, optical interconnects, and system-level architecture design.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Nvidia and Marvell CEOs to share Computex stage— How US$2 billion turned rivals into partners

When Nvidia quietly wrote a US$2 billion check to Marvell Technology earlier this year, it was less a financial bet than a strategic maneuver — one that converted a potential rival into a committed partner. Now, for the first time since that deal was struck, the two companies' CEOs will share a stage.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Inside China's chip war: How Xiaomi, BYD, and Nio are rewriting the rules

China's semiconductor war has been underway for seven or eight years now.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Chiplet boom puts Taiwan's InPsytech and its AI connectivity IPs in the spotlight

As the global semiconductor industry pivots toward chiplet-based designs — where multiple smaller chips are packaged together rather than built as a single monolithic die — the specialized intellectual property that makes those chips communicate reliably has become critical infrastructure. InPsytech, a Taiwanese IP design firm and subsidiary of Egis Technology, has staked its business on exactly that.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Huawei Tau Law series 1: How China's chip industry is pivoting beyond Moore's Law

When Huawei unveiled its "Tau (τ) Scaling Law" at ISCAS 2026 in Shanghai, the announcement signalled more than another chip architecture update. It marked China's most ambitious attempt yet to redefine how semiconductor performance is measured in the post-Moore era.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

AMD and Nvidia deepen investments in Taiwan semiconductor ecosystem

When AMD CEO Lisa Su arrived in Taiwan on May 20, she announced plans to invest more than US$10 billion with local supply-chain partners and the island's broader semiconductor ecosystem. The goal, she said, was to help secure a long-term supply of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Win Semiconductors bets on optical and satellite communications growth

Facing expanding opportunities in both optical communications and satellite connectivity, Dennis Chen, chairman of Win Semiconductors, said the company is actively advancing a range of products, including driver ICs, continuous-wave (CW) lasers, and photodiodes, while also ramping up capacity in anticipation of growing demand from next-generation networks.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

GlobalWafers rolls out phased GaN capacity expansion to ease supply crunch

Following GlobalWafers' shareholders' meeting on May 25, Chairperson Doris Hsu stated that the company's core compound semiconductor business, gallium nitride (GaN), is addressing strong demand for high-efficiency power solutions in AI servers. The company is also beginning to see emerging demand from diversified applications such as AI robotics. As a result, production capacity in 2026 has already entered a state of supply shortage. To meet strong demand from Japanese IDM customers, GlobalWafers is launching a continuous "30% plus 20%" expansion plan.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Analysis: Huawei's Tau Law signals a new semiconductor framework — with implications beyond China

As the global semiconductor industry approaches the physical limits of transistor scaling, Huawei has proposed a new framework for the post-Moore era through its recently introduced "Tau (τ) Law" and a related time-scaling theory.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

GlobalWafers to increase prices, targets 4Q26 shipments for square wafers, Asia capacity fully booked

GlobalWafers held its shareholders' meeting on May 25, where CEO Doris Hsu stated that the semiconductor market in 2026 has gradually moved beyond 2025's two extremes, when only AI and advanced process technologies dominated growth. In 2026, non-AI and traditional application markets began to recover, making market conditions thrive.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

China pushes homegrown AI stack with local chips, LLMs

Following the conclusion of the Trump-Xi meeting and amid continued delays in China approving imports of Nvidia H20 GPUs, China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on May 22 sent a strong policy signal on artificial intelligence (AI) self-sufficiency, explicitly calling for greater efforts to pair domestic large language models with domestically developed computing chips.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Wingtech sues Nexperia for US$1.2B as it fights delisting risk

Wingtech Technology, the Chinese tech company that owns Dutch semiconductor manufacturer Nexperia, has filed a civil lawsuit against Nexperia and five defendants for alleged damages worth CNY8 billion (approx. US$1.2 billion). The case is the latest development of the legal troubles between the Chinese company and its subsidiary following the Dutch government's seizure of the company in late 2025 for national security reasons.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Lightmatter joins TSMC on COUPE for 3D optical engines

AI computing's massive demand for infrastructure is making interconnect and laser technologies key to overcoming power and bandwidth limits, prompting silicon photonics unicorn Lightmatter to unveil its latest laser product, Guide DR. To advance its 3D-stacked silicon photonics engine, Lightmatter is also working closely with TSMC using its Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE) platform.

Tuesday 26 May 2026

Analysis: Nvidia's Vera CPU opens new front in data center chip race

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pushing the company deeper into the CPU market, betting that the rise of agentic AI will create a new growth engine beyond the GPUs that made Nvidia the dominant supplier of AI computing hardware.

Monday 25 May 2026

Huawei reveals post-Moore semiconductor roadmap targeting 1.4nm-equivalent chip performance

As the global semiconductor industry confronts the limits of Moore's Law, Huawei has unveiled a new roadmap aimed at extending chip performance growth through architecture, interconnect, and system-level optimisation rather than pure transistor miniaturisation.

Monday 25 May 2026

India-based Cyient Semiconductors raises US$30 million to scale power chips for global AI markets

Cyient Semiconductors has secured a total of about US$30 million in financing from Edelweiss-managed funds and co-investors, comprising a US$10 million equity investment at a valuation of roughly US$500 million alongside structured debt. The deal bolsters its capital base to scale its power semiconductor and custom silicon offerings for global AI markets.

Monday 25 May 2026

Nvidia's reporting pivot and AMD's US$10B Taiwan bet signal a new frontier in AI chip war

Nvidia's structural pivot to isolate its ACIE market and AMD's US$10 billion investment in Taiwan infrastructure signal a profound realignment in the AI chip war. Both developments reflect a shared urgency to expand beyond traditional hyperscale clouds into the booming, highly lucrative global enterprise, industrial, and sovereign AI factory frontiers.

Monday 25 May 2026

Anthropic-Microsoft deal could broaden ASIC demand across cloud supply chains

Anthropic has reportedly approached Microsoft about renting AI computing power running on Microsoft's in-house chips to expand support for its Claude model business. The move is a positive sign for Microsoft and could generate momentum for the mass production of its recently unveiled Maia 200 chip, while ASIC players such as Global Unichip and Ethernet chip suppliers Marvell Technology and Broadcom also stand to benefit.

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