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Friday 6 February 2026

South Korean president meets conglomerate chiefs as Samsung, others pledge US$186b in regional investments

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung recently convened a meeting at the Blue House titled the "Corporate Roundtable on Youth Employment and Expanded Regional Investment," bringing together leaders from the country's 10 largest conglomerates, including Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor and LG Group, along with representatives from the financial sector. Lee urged companies to work with the government to promote youth employment, entrepreneurship and more balanced regional development.

Friday 6 February 2026

Transcend sees 4x revenue surge in January 2026 as memory prices rise

Memory module maker Transcend Information reported a record high monthly consolidated revenue of NT$4.76 billion (US$150.4 million) in January 2026, driven by soaring demand for AI servers, large-scale industrial control shipments, and steadily rising memory prices.

Friday 6 February 2026

PC makers reportedly eye China DRAM for the first time as global memory supply tightens

Global DRAM supply remains tight, pushing major PC makers, including HP, Dell, Acer, and Asus, to consider sourcing memory chips for the first time from Chinese suppliers such as ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) to offset price surges driven by booming AI demand.

Friday 6 February 2026

YMTC Phase III speeds Wuhan fab installations and domestic equipment deliveries

China's semiconductor investment is once again converging in Wuhan. YMTC's Phase III fab has entered an intensive equipment installation phase, with key process tools steadily moving into the cleanroom. Construction, tool setup, and system commissioning are progressing simultaneously, targeting facility completion and production ramp-up in the second half of 2026.

Friday 6 February 2026

PSMC narrows losses as DRAM prices and AI demand boost revenue

Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, one of Taiwan's smaller but strategically positioned chipmakers, reported a sharp narrowing of losses in the fourth quarter of 2025, buoyed by rising memory prices, a stronger US dollar, and income from an overseas partnership with India's Tata Group.

Friday 6 February 2026

Qualcomm 1QFY26 earnings call: memory shortages redefine smartphones despite strong demand

Qualcomm delivered record results in its fiscal first quarter, but executives warned that a worsening memory supply imbalance is now constraining the global smartphone market, even as underlying consumer demand remains strong.

Thursday 5 February 2026

Nvidia reportedly seeks faster HBM4 deliveries from Samsung under the global memory crunch

Nvidia has recently signaled to Samsung Electronics that it hopes to secure early deliveries of sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory, known as HBM4. At the same time, as memory makers devote an increasing share of capacity to HBM production, shortages of conventional memory chips have begun to emerge, strengthening suppliers' bargaining power across the industry.

Thursday 5 February 2026

Memory shortage weighs on Qualcomm, Arm as smartphone chip sales slow

Arm Holdings reported fiscal third-quarter revenue growth of 26% from a year earlier, supported by gains in licensing and royalties, while memory supply constraints in the smartphone market continued to weigh on expectations for mobile-related royalty income.

Thursday 5 February 2026

Adata sees January revenue nearly triple, as memory prices hold in 2026

The ongoing tight supply of memory chips globally has driven contract price surges for DRAM and NAND flash. As a result, memory module maker Adata Technology once again reported explosive growth in January 2026, with consolidated revenue for the month soaring to NT$8.41 billion (US$266.23 million), up 198.92% year over year and 44.78% sequentially. This marks the company's second consecutive month of record-breaking single-month revenue following December 2025.

Thursday 5 February 2026

Qualcomm reports record 1QFY26 results, flags memory constraints in near-term outlook

Qualcomm reported record financial results for its fiscal first quarter of 2026, while guiding lower for the current quarter as memory supply constraints begin to weigh on handset production.

Thursday 5 February 2026

Networking equipment makers seek new businesses as they unlikely to avoid margin pressure

The networking industry is seeing a rebound in demand in 2026, but worsening imbalances in memory supply and demand have emerged as the biggest variable affecting operations this year. Senao Networks chairman Tommy Tsai said that major cloud service providers (CSPs) have locked up DDR4 and DDR5 capacity, leading to supply-demand mismatches for DDR3, DDR4, and even NAND flash used in networking equipment. In the spot market, there have even been extreme cases of memory prices surging tenfold. This wave of component shortages has put pressure on networking equipment makers that had been optimistic about growth in 2026. While overall order momentum remains intact, runaway memory prices could directly erode gross margins.

Thursday 5 February 2026

Samsung sees net cash surpass KRW100 trillion, fueling semiconductor investment, M&As

Samsung Electronics has once again pushed its net cash above KRW100 trillion (US$68.97 billion), reaching KRW100.61 trillion at the end of 2025, up 7.8% from the same period in 2024. This marks Samsung's return to the milestone for the first time since 2022, highlighting its increasingly robust financial structure and strong capital deployment capabilities.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Nvidia's HBM4 tests near completion as SK Hynix ramps 1b DRAM

SK Hynix is accelerating production of 1b DRAM for high-bandwidth memory as quality testing of Nvidia's next-generation HBM4 nears its final stage, according to Korean media and industry sources.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Nvidia shapes the HBM4 race as Samsung, SK Hynix jockey for position

Record demand for artificial intelligence applications propelled Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to milestone financial results in 2025. On January 29, 2026, the two South Korean memory giants held rare, nearly simultaneous earnings calls to signal their respective positions in the race for the next generation of high-bandwidth memory.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Samsung, SK Hynix move into HBM4 as yields and policy risks loom

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have both secured production-ready technology for 16-layer stacks of sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory, known as HBM4, positioning the two South Korean memory makers for a pivotal contest in 2026 as demand from artificial intelligence accelerators expands. While each company has demonstrated technical readiness, industry participants say yield performance, rather than headline specifications, is likely to determine market share, profitability, and supplier standing in the next phase of the HBM cycle.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

AI upgrades intensify high-capacity NOR Flash shortages; SLC and MLC become scarce commodities

Benefiting from specification upgrades in AI servers and switches, the content per box of NOR Flash is set to grow by multiples, with high-capacity specifications likely to face severe supply shortages. NOR Flash price increases in the second quarter of 2026 are expected to jump 40–50% quarter-on-quarter from the first quarter, with some product lines even seeing customers willing to pay premiums to secure supply. As for legacy-process products with tight supply, such as SLC NAND and MLC NAND, price hikes are even more aggressive. Second-quarter contract prices are rumored to see year-on-year increases of up to 400–500%, prompting Winbond Electronics to accelerate the expansion of its SLC NAND capacity.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

China's memory makers abandon low-price strategy: DRAM, NAND near Korean levels

Recent market speculation has claimed that China's memory producer CXMT is triggering a price war by offloading DDR4 at deep discounts. Supply chain sources, however, said CXMT has largely pivoted to DDR5 process development, keeping only around 10,000 wafers of DDR4 capacity for a handful of long-term customers, making large-scale, low-priced dumping into the open market unlikely.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Nanya Technology sees January revenue jump more than sixfold amid DRAM supply crunch

Benefiting from rising memory prices and supply shortages, DRAM giant Nanya Technology reported revenue of NT$15.31 billion (US$484.8 million) for January 2026, up 27.39% sequentially and surging a staggering 608.02% year over year. This growth reflects both monthly and annual gains, setting a new record for single-month revenue.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

CXMT, YMTC scale up DRAM and HBM output keenly in largest expansion push yet

Amid an acute global memory chip shortage, China's leading manufacturers ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) are rolling out their most aggressive capacity expansion plans, seeking to close the gap with global giants Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Intel and SoftBank's SAIMEMORY target 2029 commercialization of Z-angle AI memory

SoftBank Corp. has launched a push into next-generation AI memory through its wholly owned unit SAIMEMORY Corp., forming a strategic collaboration with Intel Corporation to commercialize a new memory architecture known as Z-Angle Memory (ZAM).

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Samsung to tear down birthplace of its chip business at Giheung campus for new R&D center

Samsung Electronics is dismantling a key building at its Giheung campus as part of plans to construct a large-scale advanced research center, according to Hankyung. The site, known as SR5, is regarded as the birthplace of the company's semiconductor business and the location where Samsung developed its 65-megabit DRAM in 1992.

Wednesday 4 February 2026

Winbond's 2027 DRAM capacity pre-sold as memory revenue nears NT$100B in 2025

The structural shortage in the memory market is driving a surge in supply chain operations, with reports indicating that Winbond recently finalized its contract pricing for the first quarter of 2026. The company expects DRAM price increases from the fourth quarter of 2025 to sustain through the second quarter of 2026, marking three consecutive quarters of growth and effectively doubling contract prices year-over-year. Furthermore, Winbond's new production capacity planned for 2027 has already been fully booked.

Tuesday 3 February 2026

AMD and Broadcom back Powertech's FOPLP; monthly revenue to hit NT$3 billion

Memory packaging giant Powertech Technology is aggressively expanding into fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP), with chairman Duh-Kung Tsai optimistic about the AI industry. Amid ongoing memory shortages and rising demand for advanced packaging, Powertech aims to become the top partner outside the TSMC ecosystem, expecting a significant revenue surge in 2027-2028 as FOPLP capacity reaches full utilization, contributing NT$3 billion (US$95 million) monthly.

Tuesday 3 February 2026

SK Hynix achieves major breakthrough in HBM4 quality tests, eyes stable supply for Nvidia Rubin

SK Hynix has reportedly made significant progress in the quality testing of Nvidia's sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) products, boosting the likelihood that it will become a stable supplier of HBM4 for Nvidia's latest Rubin GPUs.

Tuesday 3 February 2026

Rising memory prices add cost pressures for IC design houses

Rising memory prices are creating fresh cost challenges for IC design firms, particularly those producing chips with embedded memory. While most chip designers feel the impact indirectly, vendors shipping system-on-chips (SoCs) with integrated memory face more immediate and significant cost pressures.

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