South Korean president Jae-Myung Lee will launch an economic diplomacy tour centered on AI, advanced industries, and supply chain cooperation, including planned meetings with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other global tech leaders to discuss AI partnerships. Samsung Electronics, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, and Naver executives will also join the trip in force.
Wistron opened its D1 AI smart factory in Fort Worth, Texas, on July 21 local time, and began mass production of the first Nvidia GB300 compute baseboard made in the US. The nearly US$700 million plant, which spans about 324,000 square feet, was unveiled by Wistron chairman Simon Lin and Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
Participation in the Global Pavilion at the upcoming SEMICON Taiwan 2026 has reached a new high, with the number of participating countries climbing to 18 and the booth count surging from 62 in 2023 to 220 in 2026, an increase of more than 250%. Both metrics set new records, reflecting that amid rising artificial intelligence (AI) investment and the regionalization of supply chains, countries are moving faster to deepen cooperation with Taiwan's semiconductor industry.
SpaceXAI is laying the groundwork for at least one large-scale AI data center in Texas, a move that could significantly expand its computing footprint beyond its existing Memphis hub and strengthen its ambitions to become a major AI infrastructure provider. According to The Information, the company has evaluated multiple sites across Texas, transferred data center staff to the state, and posted job openings related to site acquisition, construction, and operations. A Texas buildout could match or exceed the roughly 1GW of compute capacity already deployed across its Memphis-area facilities.
Fitch Ratings has adjusted its Taiwan GDP growth forecasts for 2026 and 2027 to 9.4% and 4.8% respectively, up from its earlier estimates of 6.9% and 4.0%. At a forum held in Taipei on July 21, Fitch noted that impacts from the US–Iran conflict are expected to be manageable. With the easing of US tariff pressures, Taiwan's economy is expected to outperform others in the Asia-Pacific region, driven primarily by strong global demand for semiconductors and AI-related products, as well as growing investment by Taiwanese companies.
ASEAN's AI boom is taking on a dual role as both a "no-man's land" and an international hub from Singapore's perspective, while investors from the Middle East and China are also pushing into the region. According to industry sources, ASEAN's AI industry will be driven not only by local demand, but also by China's market.
LG Electronics plans to stop production at its Huizhou plant in China after October, ending manufacturing at the group's first production subsidiary in the country after more than three decades.
Smobio Technology, a strategic investment of Global Lighting Technologies (GLT), will officially list on Taiwan's Emerging Stock Board on July 24. The company's precast gel products have gained interest from international biotech companies, and it is actively discussing opportunities for private-level collaborations.
China's exports of rare-earth permanent magnets reached record levels in the first half of 2026, yet the same customs data reveal a market increasingly shaped less by demand than by Beijing's discretion — flowing freely to most of the world, throttled to the US, and, since January, newly restricted to Japan.
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has criticized Intel's past strategy in a recent interview, revisiting the company's history with Nvidia and Apple while also weighing in on Taiwan Strait tensions and the outlook for quantum computing. Speaking at the RAISE Summit AI conference in Paris, he said Intel dismissed Nvidia GPUs at the height of its CPU dominance as nothing more than graphics tools for gamers.
Zeiss is moving into a new AI chip battleground as advanced packaging and silicon photonics rise on the back of chiplet-based architectures, multi-chip integration, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). The company says it is extending decades of lithography expertise into advanced packaging, metrology, inspection, and co-packaged optics (CPO) to build competitiveness for the next decade.
