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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.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

TI sees uneven recovery: Industrial rebuilds and data center booms, but consumer electronics fade

Texas Instruments' latest commentary during its Q4 2025 earnings call on January 27, 2026, shows a company increasingly shaped by industrial, automotive, and data center demand, even as consumer-facing segments remain uneven. Management framed fourth-quarter results as broadly in line with expectations, while emphasizing that the mix of end markets—not pricing—is driving both near-term performance and longer-term strategy.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

TI accelerates capacity push, shrugs off memory shortages

Texas Instruments (TI) signaled urgency around capacity planning, stressing that today's capital spending choices will determine its ability to serve demand years ahead, while downplaying fears that rising memory prices are constraining near-term demand across its core markets.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

The end of the copper age? Lightmatter builds an alliance to power the optical future

In a major coordinated push to reshape high-performance computing, Lightmatter has announced strategic collaborations with Global Unichip Corp. (GUC), Synopsys, and Cadence.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Taiwanese chipmakers eye Europe and US as visual AI market in China gets saturated

Taiwanese semiconductor companies specializing in visual AI technologies are pivoting away from the Chinese market, increasingly focusing on Europe and the US amid growing challenges in China. These firms are advancing comprehensive solutions encompassing SoCs, ISPs, sensors, and algorithms to maintain competitiveness.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

US shows endorsement of Taiwan industry by granting MFN status on Section 232 tariffs, Taiwan officials say

Taiwan's finance minister and central bank governor have welcomed the US promise to extend most-favored-nation treatment under Section 232 tariffs, calling it a strong endorsement of Taiwan's industries in the trade negotiations between the two countries.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Chinese GPU startup Iluvatar CoreX lays out roadmap targeting Nvidia's Rubin

Chinese GPU startup Iluvatar CoreX has unveiled a multi-generation product roadmap that it says could see its fourth-generation architecture surpass Nvidia's upcoming Rubin platform by 2027, marking one of the latest efforts by domestic Chinese chipmakers to advance their AI computing capabilities.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Apple, Qualcomm rethink heavy reliance on TSMC as costs rise

Even as TSMC retains a clear technological lead in advanced process nodes, Apple and Qualcomm are reassessing how heavily they rely on a single foundry. Qualcomm has confirmed plans to return to a dual-track strategy for its processor system-on-chip products, placing orders with both TSMC and Samsung Electronics.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Microsoft's Maia 200 volumes set to jump more than tenfold from Maia 100 levels, DIGITIMES says

Microsoft introduced Maia 200 on January 27, 2026, its latest in-house AI accelerator, as part of a broader effort to optimize cloud infrastructure for inference-heavy workloads. Analysts see the move as aimed at lowering costs, reducing reliance on external chip suppliers, and strengthening control over Azure's AI hardware stack.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Nvidia pours US$2 billion into CoreWeave for AI infrastructure expansion

Nvidia and cloud computing firm CoreWeave have announced an expanded partnership to build more than 5 gigawatts of AI "factories" by 2030, aiming to support the rapid growth of artificial intelligence workloads worldwide. As part of the deal, Nvidia invested US$2 billion in CoreWeave Class A common stock at US$87.20 per share, reflecting confidence in CoreWeave's team, strategy, and cloud platform built on Nvidia technology.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Commentary: Behind the scenes of Jensen Huang's China trip

While global political and economic elites were still exchanging remarks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang exited and flew straight to Shanghai.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

Microsoft launches Maia 200 AI chip, mass production progress draws attention

Microsoft officially introduced its second-generation AI accelerator, Maia 200, on January 27, marking its continued efforts in chip development since 2019. The new chip emphasizes improved inference performance and is produced with TSMC's advanced 3nm process technology.

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