Infineon Technologies and US-based silicon carbide (SiC) leader Wolfspeed announced on October 15 a new multi-year supply agreement for 8-inch SiC wafers. This deal transitions their existing supply partnership from 6-inch to 8-inch substrate technology, positioning both companies to meet future demand across electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energy systems, and AI data center power infrastructure.

Sony Group will not spin off its semiconductor business, which focuses on image sensors, president and CEO Hiroki Totoki said recently. The group is retaining the unit because its imaging-sensor expertise creates synergies between components and creative production, while a partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) will support future manufacturing investment.

AMD and Intel plan to consolidate their PyTorch optimizations for x86 processors in oneDNN, aiming to give AI developers a common path to performance improvements across both companies' CPUs and reduce the work of maintaining separate software paths.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told employees in a memo on October 19 that the company will conduct global, performance-based layoffs after completing its annual employee evaluations, with notifications expected to begin in November. The move aims to build a stronger performance culture and address the company's continued failure to meet expectations.

The US imposed sanctions on five Chinese entities tied to ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding for theft of trade secrets. The action follows his conviction for stealing confidential AI technology from Google, apparently to benefit Chinese firms.

Physical AI that can sense, reason, control machines and interact with people, Salil Raje, senior vice president of AMD's Embedded Computing Group, said TOPS (trillions of operations per second) no longer adequately measures performance, and that the industry must rethink how it defines performance for systems that require end-to-end, real-time responsiveness.

The AI infrastructure race is increasingly becoming a contest over who can turn electrical capacity, cooling systems, and hardware into usable compute the fastest.

Chinese tech giants ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have collectively ordered more than 3 million units of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, representing a total value exceeding US$35 billion, as reported by Reuters.

South Korean IC design firm LX Semicon has deployed AI agents in the development of display driver ICs (DDIs), reducing the design time for a benchmark image-processing engine from 10 days to two. The company said two large-size LCD TV DDI products developed with the technology have reached tape-out, with mass production planned for early to mid-2027 for television panels in Greater China.

Nvidia is positioning its Vera CPU as a central component of data-center infrastructure for agentic artificial intelligence, as multistep reasoning and tool calls increase demand for fast serial processing. The company says CPU resources are gaining importance alongside GPUs, while declining GPU-to-CPU ratios signal a potential redesign of AI computing architectures.

China's Hygon Information Technology reported a 57.58% increase in revenue for the first nine months of 2026, reflecting sustained demand for domestic high-performance processors and AI computing chips. Yet slower quarterly growth, mounting R&D expenditure and a steep share-price correction have highlighted the gap between the company's operating performance and market expectations.

DeepSeek is reportedly working closely with Huawei to influence the design of its future AI chips, a link reportedly closer than typical supplier-customer relationships. The collaboration shows the growing ties between two of China's largest technology firms to sidestep Nvidia.

China's electronic design automation (EDA) industry is consolidating, with Shanghai-based S2C and Wuxi-based HyperSilicon merging into a unified digital front-end EDA platform. Backed by Empyrean Technology and other investors, the deal aims to strengthen domestic capabilities in hardware emulation, chip verification, and simulation.

Intel is pitching its foundry as the industry's supplier of light sources for AI data center optics, claiming at the 2026 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit that it is the only high-volume fab that can deliver 12-inch indium phosphide (InP) silicon photonics (SiPh) at scale to the industry.

Cumulative shipments of chips incorporating Alibaba DAMO Academy's RISC-V processor intellectual property (IP), branded XuanTie, have surpassed 6 billion, marking a milestone for the open-source architecture as the company expands beyond embedded applications into AI computing, servers, autonomous driving, and robotics.

A research team at Yale University in the US has found that flowing networks made of water or other fluids can store memory like computer chips, leading to the development of a fluidic memory chip with potential applications in soft robots. The team recently published its findings in Physical Review X (PRX).

China is proposing to extend AI technology export controls to chip design, memory technologies, and large-scale computing clusters, introducing specific technical thresholds for each.

Google Quantum AI said on October 15, 2026, that it has shown "magic state cultivation" working in practice on its Willow processor, reducing errors about 40-fold compared with uncultivated states. The result, published in Science, is a crucial step toward scaling quantum computing to practical use.

Nvidia is actively recruiting for a director of government affairs in Taiwan, as it deepens its presence on the island. The role is responsible for developing and executing government relations strategies for Taiwan and reports directly to the company's head of global policy, highlighting its focus on government relations, policy assessment, and geopolitical analysis in Taiwan.

Market reports have recently suggested that MediaTek's tensor processing unit (TPU) v9 project with Google could face delays in volume production as Google reportedly revises the chip's design. Industry observers expect MediaTek may address some of these concerns during its earnings conference in late October.

Taiwanese electronics makers are deepening their presence in Mexico's Chihuahua state, drawn by surging US demand for AI servers, officials and business leaders told a seminar in Taipei on October 19. The pace of foreign investment is driven by the state's access to the US market, even as Chihuahua seeks to transition from a manufacturing base into a research and design hub.

IBM and Siemens will collaborate on research to develop IBM's nanostack transistor architecture, aiming to move its design toward manufacturing. The work could influence chip performance, energy efficiency, and artificial-intelligence computing worldwide, as the companies seek to address design, simulation, lithography, and production challenges beyond the 7-angstrom node.

South Korean ASIC design solutions provider ASICLAND showcased its proprietary AxHub AI chip design and verification platform at SEDEX 2026 as it seeks to accelerate custom chip development and strengthen its advanced process and packaging capabilities through its Taiwan R&D center. Memory controller projects remain its primary revenue source, supporting its expansion into AI chip mass production and overseas markets.

Malaysia's push to move from assembling chips to owning the designs behind them has reached the point where it must find buyers. On October 16, the government unveiled six semiconductor innovations developed by local companies, putting their combined sales potential at MYR300 million (approximately US$73.5 million), while Economy Minister Akmal Nasrullah Mohd Nasir said winning customers and passing industry qualification were still ahead.

Academia Sinica academician Chenming Hu has published an autobiography titled Find the Solutions, taken from the words on a crystal plaque presented to him by then TSMC chairman Morris Chang. Hu, who has worked in both academia and industry, said universities' ability to conduct thorough testing could help the semiconductor industry overcome technological bottlenecks.