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Wednesday 9 September 2026

Qualcomm to build custom AI inference chips for AWS

Qualcomm's multi-generation agreement to build customized AI inference silicon and optical interconnects for Amazon gives the company something its data center roadmap has lacked since it re-entered the market: a named, US-scale hyperscaler willing to put Qualcomm parts into a production fleet. The commercial value was not disclosed; the strategic value is the point. Qualcomm has spent the past year buying its way into AI infrastructure and telling investors it belongs there. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest buyer of AI compute in the market, has now agreed.

Wednesday 9 September 2026

China GPU developer Biren expands AI chip R&D into optical interconnects, advanced cooling

Chinese GPU developer Biren Technology has teamed up with Shanghai University to establish an Integrated Circuit Intelligent Chip Joint Laboratory, expanding their cooperation into joint research on AI-chip optical interconnects and advanced thermal management.

Wednesday 9 September 2026

Arm expands AI platform strategy across cloud, robotics and mobile

Arm unveiled new platforms and ecosystem programs for cloud data centers, Physical AI and mobile devices on September 8, broadening its role beyond CPU intellectual property into a wider AI computing platform. The company said the push is aimed at supporting agentic AI, which requires systems to plan tasks, retrieve data, coordinate models and take actions on behalf of users.

Wednesday 9 September 2026

Realtek expands Wi-Fi 8, optical communications, ASICs, keeps Nvidia partnership low-profile

ITRI held its 15th Laureate Ceremony on September 7, honoring three new laureates in 2026: TSMC executive vice president and co-COO Y.P. Chyn, Realtek chairman Sun-Chien Chiu, and superintendent of Taipei Veterans General Hospital Wei-Ming Chen.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Ma-tek August revenue hits record, eyes U.S. FA, MA service in 2027

MA-tek, a semiconductor testing and analysis company, reported August revenue of NT$565 million, up 17.78% from a year earlier and marking a record high for the sixth straight month. Revenue for the first eight months reached NT$4.196 billion, up 17.66% from the same period in 2025.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

What to expect at CIOE, Shenzhen's optoelectronics mega-expo

This week, DIGITIMES heads to Shenzhen to cover an expo showcasing the world of optoelectronics, a class of technologies that serves as the link between electricity and light. In today's era of pervasive digital connectivity, from smart glasses to cars to phones, this event is expected to give us a glimpse into the hardware supply chain behind these devices, and increasingly behind the global AI infrastructure build-out.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

CIOE 2026 opens in Shenzhen: 5,000 exhibitors chase the AI-driven optics boom

The 27th China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE 2026) will run September 9-11 in Shenzhen, bringing together more than 5,000 exhibitors from over 30 countries and regions as AI infrastructure, high-speed optical communications and AR/VR applications reshape the optoelectronics industry.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Malaysia weighs Huawei Ascend 910C for MYR2 billion sovereign AI cloud

Malaysia is evaluating Huawei Technologies' Ascend 910C accelerators as the compute backbone of its MYR2 billion (US$494 million) sovereign AI initiative, which is designed to keep national data under domestic control, Bloomberg reported on Sept. 7, citing people familiar with the matter. The number of chips under consideration remains unclear, and no supplier decision has been announced.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Analysis: Imec's EUV edge raises question over how far Taiwan should replicate research fab model

If Taiwan's government is determined enough, finding funding and land for the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) or the National Institutes of Applied Research (NIAR) is not necessarily the hardest part. The more difficult question comes later: who will shoulder the enormous and recurring cost of keeping advanced semiconductor research infrastructure running?

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Huawei Kirin 9050 Pro puts LogicFolding to the test with 55% density gain, 66% lower NPU power

Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial test of its Tau Scaling Law, with the company claiming a 55% increase in transistor density at the same process node while cutting NPU, GPU and CPU performance-core power by 66%, 58% and 41%, respectively.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

India's IndieSemiC targets 3 to 5 million Wi-Fi camera modules as local CCTV rules spur demand

Indian chip design company IndieSemiC is targeting shipments of 3 to 5 million locally made Wi-Fi modules in FY27-28, betting that security requirements for CCTV equipment will encourage camera makers to replace imported connectivity modules with products sourced in India.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Black Sesame, Horizon Robotics unveil China's smart driving chip race

China's intelligent driving market continues to surge, with Black Sesame Technologies and Horizon Robotics both reporting solid top-line revenue growth for the first half of 2026. Highlighting the rapid commercialization curve, Horizon Robotics announced on September 3 that cumulative mass production of its Journey series smart driving processors surpassed 15 million units—signaling that competition in China's automotive IC sector is shifting from raw computing battles to large-scale mass deployment and market penetration.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

AI demand gives Aspeed visibility into 2027 as supply constraints ease

Aspeed chairman Chris Lin said the company's order visibility has now extended into 2027, with 2027 backlog already exceeding expected full-year 2026 revenue for the first time. He added that easing supply-chain bottlenecks should support sequential growth in the second half of 2026 and stronger pricing from the fourth quarter onward.

Monday 7 September 2026

How UC Santa Cruz's Silicon Valley lab is reverse-engineering the human brain to solve AI's chip power crisis

As the global race for artificial intelligence (AI) consumes vast oceans of electricity and pushes modern utility grids to the brink, a team of California researchers is looking to biological neuroscience to build an entirely new class of energy-efficient microelectronics. Their objective is straightforward but radical: reverse-engineer the human brain to solve the semiconductor industry's looming power and thermal bottlenecks.

Monday 7 September 2026

Huawei Kirin 9050 Pro revives flagship chip launches with reported LogicFolding architecture in Mate XT 2

Huawei has unveiled the Kirin 9050 Pro in its new Mate XT 2 tri-fold smartphone, marking the commercial debut of the LogicFolding architecture behind its Tau Scaling Law and Huawei's first new high-performance Kirin chip introduced at a flagship launch in six years.

Monday 7 September 2026

DeepSeek plans to buy 160,000 Huawei chips as China aims to wean itself off Nvidia

DeepSeek is reportedly planning to purchase 160,000 Huawei chips for its large 1 GW data center currently under construction in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. This would make it among the largest clusters of Huawei chips deployed to date, as the Chinese authorities attempt to wean the country off Nvidia chips, but still struggle with insufficient domestic manufacturing capacity.

Monday 7 September 2026

Huawei Kirin 2026 challenges 3D chip heat limits with Tau Scaling Law

Huawei is using measured data from its upcoming Kirin 2026 processor to challenge a key concern around vertically stacked logic: that higher transistor density inevitably brings more heat.

Monday 7 September 2026

Wah Lee sees faster growth in 2027 as supply stays tight

Wah Lee Industrial expects growth to accelerate in 2027 as advanced packaging capacity comes online and foundries continue building overseas fabs, while tight supplies of semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment are likely to keep pricing elevated.

Monday 7 September 2026

Every Chinese CPU maker grew in 1H26 but only one grew on processors

Revenue rose at every Chinese chip company examined in the first half of 2026 amid the domestic-substitution push, but the interim filings show three quite different businesses hiding under one label. One has reached real scale and is now funding its expansion from the balance sheet rather than from operations. One is repairing its margins on a genuinely homegrown instruction set at a fraction of the scale. And the cohort's most spectacular profit number is not a processor story at all.

Monday 7 September 2026

SiliconAuto pushes AI chiplets as automotive SoC ties tighten

Taiwanese automotive microcontroller (MCU) maker SiliconAuto showcased its products at SEMICON Taiwan 2026, with CEO Gene Liu saying the company is now spotlighting AI chiplet architecture for automotive and industrial edge AI as carmakers seek more flexible chip designs.

Monday 7 September 2026

AI is driving force behind 'Moore's Law on steroids,' says Merck's Benjamin Hein

AI is driving a new wave of technological demand and changing how the semiconductor industry innovates, according to Benjamin Hein, member of the executive board and CEO of the Electronics Business Sector at Merck. As AI becomes an integral part of semiconductor innovation, future competitive advantages in the industry will depend less on any single process or material, but rather on the ability to combine materials, processes, packaging, metrology, and software into complete processes. In this sense, AI-driven growth in the semiconductor industry is like "Moore's Law on steroids," and collaboration will become the industry's next Moore's Law.

Friday 4 September 2026

From chips to physical AI: Experts urge Taiwan-US push for trusted drone supply chains at Semicon Taiwan 2026

Trustworthy supply chain concerns are extending beyond semiconductors to drones and other autonomous systems, now emerging as national strategic industries. At a Semicon Taiwan 2026 side forum, defense and industry experts from Taiwan and the US called for stronger production capacity, standardized interfaces, testing infrastructure and predictable government procurement to turn Taiwan's supply chain strengths into a globally trusted base for unmanned systems.

Friday 4 September 2026

How agentic AI and 'AI physics' are reshaping chip design

As semiconductor designs advance toward trillion-transistor packages, the traditional engineering playbook of simply adding more personnel or running legacy software faster has hit a wall, a top Nvidia executive warned Tuesday.

Friday 4 September 2026

China interconnect chipmaker Montage enters Samsung, SK Hynix CXL 3.2 supply chains and begins DDR6 development

Montage Technology is accelerating its move beyond traditional DDR memory interfaces, with CXL 3.2, DDR6 and PCIe products positioning the Chinese interconnect chipmaker deeper in AI data center infrastructure.

Friday 4 September 2026

Fujitsu says useful quantum computers may need far fewer qubits than expected

For years the quantum industry has worked on a discouraging assumption: that a machine capable of doing anything commercially useful would need a million qubits or more. Fujitsu told a Taipei audience that the number is coming down sharply, and that its own work is part of the reason.

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