China's semiconductor self-reliance campaign is moving beyond lithography machines and advanced processors into less visible materials that can be just as difficult to replace. Ajinomoto Build-up Film, or ABF, has become the latest pressure point.

On February 20, 2026, Canadian AI chip startup Taalas unveiled its HC1 inference chip. Taalas said the chip ran the Llama 3.1 8B model at a single-user inference speed of 16,960 tokens per second, roughly 48 times the inference speed of an Nvidia B200 in the company's testing.

Around 2019, a friend working at a large cloud services provider excitedly shared that his team had trained a CNN model for document text recognition with good results, but the computing cost was too high to deploy directly. They then used distillation to train a smaller model for service, and it turned out to be highly effective.

Amid global supply chain restructuring and geopolitical rivalry, precious metals are no longer merely financial hedging tools but have become core assets supporting high-tech manufacturing and strategic material reserves.

As physical AI and robotics draw unprecedented market attention, a key bottleneck is clogging the deployment pipeline: quality, real-world physical data. To move applications from the lab to real-world deployment, companies are getting creative in overcoming this obstacle while balancing affordability, stability, and data volumes.

Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree Robotics has drawn significant market attention with its IPO. Based on DIGITIMES' review of the company's three-hour IPO roadshow and Q&A session on August 7, chairman Xingxing Wang and the management team provided further details on humanoid robot commercialization, embodied intelligence, and its supply chain strategy.

Ken Phua, former Arm China co-CEO, spent 25 years abroad building someone else's business model. He came home to Singapore to build his own.

The speed of AI data center deployment is raising the bar for power and cooling suppliers. Chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD are refreshing platforms annually, with each generation bringing sharp increases in power density and thermal requirements. Suppliers that cannot match that pace in R&D or capacity deployment risk missing the next design cycle.

In July, an OpenAI AI agent model successfully bypassed safety restrictions during internal testing and even launched an automated cyberattack against Hugging Face, the world's largest open-source AI community platform, drawing intense attention. The incident, seen as the first publicly disclosed case of "AI attacking the AI ecosystem/platform," underscores how AI's rapid evolution is shifting cyber risk from "humans attacking systems" to "AI attacking AI."

When people talk about responding to supply chain shocks, the instinct is often to stockpile inventory or build backup production lines. However, after visiting Inner Mongolia Shuangjie Saidu Electric with a delegation in June 2026, I came away with a different understanding: true "supply chain resilience" is not created through last-minute crisis fixes. It is embedded in factory layout, product design, business diversification, and service models.

Global AI computing is rapidly moving beyond single-GPU systems toward AI Factory architectures, where agentic AI and inference workloads are pushing data centers to rely on networking, optics, packaging, cooling, power delivery and software co-design rather than raw accelerator counts. In a DIGITIMES interview, Nvidia Senior Vice President of Networking Gilad Shainer said the real unit of computing is now the entire data center, not an individual server.

Google has carried out its biggest artificial intelligence (AI) reorganization since merging Google Brain and DeepMind in 2023, putting Sundar Pichai and Koray Kavukcuoglu at the center of its AI strategy. The move ends the company's three-year scientist-led model and creates a clearer chain of command across research, models, products, and business. The implications extend beyond personnel, suggesting Google is prioritizing execution, accountability, and commercial returns over academic prestige.

DeepSeek's participation in Unitree's Shanghai STAR Market IPO was made at the corporate level, not personally by founder Liang Wenfeng or a fund associated with him.

Taiwan's role in the global AI supply chain is shifting from manufacturing toward engineering, Nvidia networking senior vice president Gilad Shainer told DIGITIMES in an interview. The island, he said, is increasingly serving as an engineering partner for next-generation AI factories rather than simply an assembler.

Driven by global net-zero commitments and China's "dual carbon" goals of peaking carbon emissions before achieving carbon neutrality, Inner Mongolia is rapidly transforming from a traditional resource-based economy into a strategic hub for renewable energy and AI computing infrastructure.