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Sep 15
US FCC, White House tighten controls on power systems, raising the trust bar for Taiwanese suppliers
The US has taken steps to tighten controls on power systems and robotics equipment in line with its "America First" policy amid the latest geopolitical shifts, adding new uncertainties for Taiwanese supply chain players seeking to establish a foothold in the US. Rather than isolated natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the risks that companies must now face are far more structural and geopolitical in nature, according to Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER) vice president Shin-horng Chen, who notes that US oversight is moving beyond mere market access for products, into deeper factors such as equipment origin, remote control, software and firmware transparency, and overall supply-chain trustworthiness.

Altera, the programmable-chip maker backed by Silver Lake and Intel, has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US, positioning the company to tap renewed investor demand for semiconductor and AI-related businesses.

Sharp Corporation began taking orders in Japan on September 15 for AI servers procured from its Taiwanese parent, Foxconn, and equipped with Nvidia processors, giving the display and consumer electronics maker a route into domestic AI infrastructure at a moment when GPU supply remains tight. The company said commercial sales are planned for fiscal 2027, and it is targeting revenue of around JPY250 billion (about US$1.6 billion) in fiscal 2030, according to Kyodo News.

Where will China's electronics manufacturing industry find growth over the next five years? The answer is taking shape in the 15th Five-Year Plan for the sector, released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC): industry revenue is targeted to exceed CNY30 trillion (US$4.47 trillion) by 2030.

MediaTek has officially launched the Dimensity 9600 Pro, introducing a major architectural overhaul for its 2026 flagship mobile chip. Beyond the shift to a 2nm process, the new platform adopts a 2+3+3 all-big-core CPU configuration, upgrades its cache architecture, and doubles its NPU resources with a dual-NPU design to support increasingly demanding AI workloads.
Humanoid robot makers are cutting prices and scaling production, yet much of the industry remains unprofitable. Upstream suppliers are starting to show a different economics — especially in dexterous robotic hands.
AI server tracker: BMC, cable, case suppliers post August 2026 gains
Sep 16, 08:30

Taiwan's AI server supply chain continued to show strong year-over-year growth in August, although performance varied significantly across baseboard management controller (BMC), cable/connector, and server-case suppliers.

DeepSeek is reportedly set to hire Wentao Yan, a partner at venture capital firm GL Ventures, as its first CFO. If the appointment takes place, it would happen at an important time for the Chinese AI startup as it seeks to go public, begins a large expansion of its workforce, and invests in chipmaking and computing capacity.

The recent AI antitrust case between two of the high-tech landscape's most powerful camps appears to have quietly ended following Elon Musk's legal retreat from Apple. But the battle over AI distribution control is far from settled, as pointed accusations from SpaceXAI and X regarding Apple's behind-the-scenes role in constraining generative-AI competition have left the broader industry unsettled over questions of AI access and app visibility amid Apple's increasingly open, multi-model ecosystem.
At the China International Optoelectronics Expo (CIOE), a palm-sized metal transceiver represents the shift from copper to light in data center infrastructure, one of the biggest transformations in the industry amid the AI boom.

DIGITIMES observed that Nvidia's newly announced NVHBM is not a brand-new memory technology, but rather an extension of existing custom HBM (cHBM). It is a managed cHBM design that moves the memory controller, which originally sat on the XPU, into the HBM logic base die, and pairs it with custom physical-layer (PHY) and die-to-die (D2D) interfaces. In strategic terms, Nvidia is extending its moat from GPUs to the memory architecture of custom ASICs, and is trying to define how future custom AI chips connect to memory, hook into scale-up networks, and come together as complete AI racks.

Suppliers in China's AR glasses supply chain see the approximately 2 billion people worldwide with myopia as a potential market and said shipments are set to double year after year, even as the industry continues to sift winners from losers. At this year's China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), smart glasses remained a standout theme alongside optical communications.