Chunghwa Telecom president Rong-shy Lin said the shift from conversational AI to autonomous AI agents is reshaping enterprise adoption, making data governance, access controls and accountability critical to deployment at scale.

Taiwan's economy is projected to grow 6.04% in 2027 as expanding global AI-related capital spending boosts the island's exports, despite geopolitical conflicts and trade barriers weighing on global growth, Taiwan's National Development Council (NDC) Minister Yeh Chun-hsien said on October 15.

Volvo Cars and Nvidia are expanding their partnership to develop automated-driving technology for future Volvo vehicles, with potential implications for drivers worldwide. The system is designed to handle highways, urban streets, and parking while gradually introducing eyes-off and mind-off driving, combining Volvo's safety expertise with Nvidia's sensors, computing, and software.

As the semiconductor industry enters the artificial intelligence (AI) era, Intel, once the dominant force in the PC market, has increasingly been viewed as a company that fell behind in the AI race.

Chinese automakers are accelerating their expansion into humanoid robotics, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, electric drive systems, and supply chain resources developed through their automotive businesses, according to DIGITIMES Intelligence.

Chun Yuan Steel expects Taiwan's auto market to deliver its strongest quarter of 2026 in the final three months, lifting full-year new-vehicle sales to 430,000 units from 411,000 in 2025. The steel processor also anticipates fresh growth opportunities as Kuozui Motors begins exporting finished vehicles to Japan, potentially strengthening Taiwan's position in Toyota Motor's global production network.

As the high power density of AI data centers (AIDCs) becomes an increasingly pressing issue, industry experts are highlighting the importance of power management and power usage effectiveness (PUE). To alleviate bottlenecks in grid infrastructure, AIDC projects must assess feeder capacity, matching accuracy for renewable power sources, and power management when selecting sites.

Japan is stepping up its push into physical AI, with major technology companies and research institutions showcasing advances in autonomous robot learning, motion sensing, and agricultural automation at CEATEC 2026.

A sharp sell-off across artificial intelligence infrastructure stocks has turned a quiet worry about debt into a main concern for Wall Street. The sudden drop in stock and bond prices for CoreWeave, a fast-growing cloud provider backed by Nvidia, has raised questions about whether the heavy borrowing used to fund the AI expansion is becoming too risky.

Strong global demand for AI infrastructure hardware is prompting buyers to secure capacity through advance payments and long-term contracts, driving Taiwan's semiconductor, packaging and testing, memory, substrate, and equipment supply chains to expand aggressively. Private investment in Taiwan is projected to reach a record NT$6.9539 trillion (US$215.4 billion) in 2026 as companies build factories, purchase equipment, import raw materials, and hire workers to meet customer demand.

At SEMICON West 2026, US officials and lawmakers promoted domestic manufacturing and AI export policies, while industry executives warned that supplier shortages, the premium for US-made products, and export controls could undermine the country's semiconductor ambitions.

Meta on Thursday released the weights of Muse Spark Open, which it calls the most capable US open-weight model to date. The company said the multimodal model has 816 billion total parameters (42 billion active) and a one-million-token context window, and is built for coding and agentic work. Meta said the weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face, Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. It also said the model received extra safety post-training and met the thresholds of its internal risk framework.

As GenAI accelerates, e-commerce is shifting from traditional traffic management toward AI-assisted shopping and intelligent operations. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce platform Shopline said its gross merchandise value (GMV) grew 20% in 2026 from 2025, 2.5 times the market average, highlighting strong performance amid intense retail competition.

As interest rates fluctuate, bond yields rise, and Chinese AI models intensify competition, market attention is shifting from technological development and infrastructure expansion to investment returns and long-term debt-servicing capacity. The AI industry continues to attract capital but must also prove that its business models can generate profits.

The focus of the global AI race has shifted from securing advanced chips to securing access to electricity, with electrical power now becoming the deciding factor for computing capacity. As power consumption surges at AI data centers (AIDCs), conventional public grids are increasingly facing bottlenecks, and self-generation and improved grid resilience are now requirements in major data center construction projects worldwide.

Investment in AI data centers remains strong, but semiconductor growth is becoming increasingly concentrated in cloud AI, while the long-running decline in consumer technology prices has come to an abrupt halt. At a SEMICON West 2026 industry outlook session, Duncan Meldrum, an economist at Hilltop Economics, warned that the shift is putting additional pressure on the broader semiconductor market.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) is seeing rising demand for CPUs related to agentic artificial intelligence (AI), but has not yet included CPUs in its calculations of AI accelerator demand growth. TSMC chairman C.C. Wei said at the company's earnings conference on October 15 that the company is maintaining its original, narrower definition of AI demand, mainly because it is difficult to clearly distinguish whether CPUs are used in traditional servers or AI servers. Actual demand also depends on how customers deploy the technology and configure their products.

As artificial intelligence increasingly blurs the boundary between the digital and physical worlds, complications associated with real-world deployment — particularly the extreme variability of physical environments — are emerging as a subtler configuration challenge in the industry spotlight.

As Manus, one of China's more distinctive AI startups, became entangled in the high-profile unwinding of its acquisition by Meta, the startup's failed attempt to capture opportunities beyond China left the industry speculating about its next steps after an abrupt regulatory reversal.

AI is clearly making an enormous impact on the global economy, with capabilities extending from language chatbots to agentic teams and the physical realm within just a few years. A new report by consulting firm Bain takes stock of AI's effects on businesses so far and projects how it could shape the near future.

LINE Taiwan marked its 15th year in the market with a strategy shift that signals broader ambitions beyond messaging. The company is expanding into AI-powered daily services, aiming to connect users, brands, and merchants through agentic AI tools, while also strengthening account security and anti-fraud defenses.

Qualcomm has historically provided standard chips primarily through its Snapdragon product line, serving a broad range of end customers. After officially launching its Dragonfly data center product line in June 2026, the company expanded its business to include multiple hyperscalers.

Anthropic plans to place new data centers in Australia away from densely populated areas, using renewable energy and previously developed sites to reduce conflicts with residents. The US artificial intelligence company is evaluating proposals from state and local governments competing for its investment, while expanding computing capacity in the country.

Japan Mobility Show Bizweek 2026 showcased Physical AI applications, including Toyota's basketball-playing robot and an air-ground inspection system, as automakers and startups explored new business opportunities beyond traditional vehicles. The business-focused exhibition, held in Japan, sought to demonstrate how robotics, artificial intelligence and mobility technologies could address industrial challenges through collaboration across sectors.

Apple's trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI went to a hearing, where OpenAI pledged not to use confidential information that Apple claims was stolen. OpenAI also accused a former employee of taking more than 100 documents related to unreleased products when joining Apple.