The Democrats' sweeping victory in the November 2026 US midterm elections, securing control of both chambers of Congress, has prompted South Korean industries to reassess the implications for investment, trade, and technology policy. With South Korea and Taiwan both heavily dependent on semiconductors, AI, and electronics, Washington's policy direction carries significant consequences for their technology sectors.

Qisda posted October consolidated revenue of NT$19.39 billion (US$590.8 million), up 13.47% year-over-year but down 1.85% from September, as its AI infrastructure, AI solutions, and smart manufacturing, and AI healthcare businesses all recorded double-digit growth from a year earlier.

Samsung Display (SDC) is facing a shortage of automotive OLED panels supplied to Chinese EV maker Li Auto, prompting Li Auto to temporarily ship some new Mega vehicles with LCD panels. Strong vehicle sales have driven demand for high-specification displays beyond expectations, potentially giving SDC's automotive OLED business fresh momentum.

Apple has opened testing of its China-specific Apple Intelligence service with the iOS 27.3 developer beta released on November 4, integrating Alibaba's Qwen model into Siri. The full version is expected in December, as Apple works to close the gap in its generative AI offerings in China.

South Korean AI software developer Moreh says AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs running its inference software delivered more than twice the throughput of Nvidia B200 GPUs in company tests, as South Korea moves ahead with plans to build AI infrastructure combining AMD processors with locally developed chips.

South Korean cloud services provider Naver Cloud now runs AMD EPYC processors in about 35,000 servers and plans to deploy 144-core fifth-generation EPYC chips in its public cloud services in the second half of 2026. The company turned to AMD after high prices for Intel's higher-core-count processors slowed its server expansion.

The Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) released a report on November 4 at the 2026 Taiwan Marine Tech & Unmanned Robotics Expo (MATURE Taiwan), examining Taiwan's unmanned boat industry and international cooperation. Experts from Ukraine and the US urged Taiwan and its allies to connect technology networks and move faster.

Chinese AI developers are losing a key route to advanced US chips, renting them in data centers outside China, as Washington and US companies stretch American controls over compute well beyond US borders. The squeeze falls heavily on Southeast Asian data center operators that built capacity around Chinese demand. Beijing, meanwhile, is pressing its own tech giants to rely less on American hardware.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group's MUFG Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group's Sumitomo Mitsui Banking (SMBC) plan to renew a combined JPY600 billion (approx. US$3.8 billion) in credit facilities for Nidec through November 2027, providing financial support as the Japanese electric motor maker works to restore confidence following an accounting scandal, according to Nikkei Asia.

Mitsui Chemicals is planning to acquire semiconductor materials maker JSR from state-backed Japan Investment (JIC) in a deal potentially worth more than JPY1.3 trillion (US$8.2 billion), which would rank as the largest acquisition in Japan's chemicals sector, according to reports by Nikkei Asia and Reuters on November 4, 2026.

Corning's move to begin making optical connectivity products in Pune and add a larger adjacent plant by 2027 shows the AI-driven surge in data center fiber demand, so far strongest in the US, starting to reshape the company's manufacturing footprint in India.

FPT has begun trial operations at a semiconductor testing and packaging plant in Vietnam's Bac Ninh province, initially focusing on chip testing as it prepares to expand into packaging technologies. The facility has six production lines and a maximum designed capacity of 300 million chips annually, the company said in a November 3 release.

Google's plan to invest US$15 billion in Malaysia over 2027 and 2028 deepens its bet on what AFP calls Southeast Asia's fastest-growing data center hub, and ties the expansion to commitments on power, water, and skills as Malaysian authorities scrutinize the facilities' demands on national resources.

China's efforts to build a complete domestic chip-design software stack are gathering pace through acquisitions and strategic investments. Empyrean Technology's latest transactions target gaps in verification, placement and routing, and logic optimisation, strengthening its challenge to established electronic design automation (EDA) suppliers.

AI expansion and rising household electricity demand are pushing Taiwan's power consumption higher, with Taipower forecasting that the Southern Taiwan Science Park's electricity load will reach about 4GW in 2031, accounting for 9% of Taiwan's total power use. Taiwan's electricity consumption per unit of land is already about 2.7 times Japan's and 1.3 times South Korea's, Taipower said.