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Monday 4 May 2026
Cerebras eyes US$40 billion IPO in high-stakes AI chip challenge to Nvidia

Cerebras Systems is preparing to raise up to US$4 billion in an initial public offering, targeting a valuation of about US$40 billion, in what could become one of the largest AI chip listings to date.

Monday 4 May 2026
Anthropic reportedly in talks with Fractile to buy inference chips amid AI compute crunch
Anthropic has been in talks with Fractile, a London-based startup, to purchase its inference chips for running its AI models more efficiently, as inferential AI tasks have pushed up compute demands, according to The Information. Although Fractile's AI chips are not expected to be available until next year at the earliest, the deal could give the maker of Claude more leverage with suppliers as it seeks to expand AI capacity to meet soaring demand.
Monday 4 May 2026
Meta acquires Assured Robot Intelligence to accelerate humanoid robotics push amid AI infrastructure shift
Meta Platforms has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup focused on AI models for humanoid robots, marking another step in the company's broader push into physical-world artificial intelligence (AI).
Monday 4 May 2026
AI's 1.6T shift turns InP into optical supply chain bottleneck

The transition from 800G to 1.6T optical modules is no longer an upgrade cycle — it is a physics-driven inflection point.

Monday 4 May 2026
Yageo's Pierre Chen says AI hardware boom is lifting passive component demand

Yageo chairman Pierre Chen said the rise of AI applications is driving stronger demand not only for advanced semiconductors and memory, but also for passive components, sensors, and power semiconductors.

Monday 4 May 2026
Weekly News Roundup: Terafab already affecting wafer fab landscape; Intel launches multi-year reset
Below are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories from the week of April 27-May 4, 2026:
Monday 4 May 2026
Apple's cash pivot: A new CEO and strategy for the AI arms race
In a landmark shift coinciding with its second quarter of fiscal 2026 results, Apple has announced that it will no longer maintain its formal "net cash neutral" target. This financial pivot comes as the company prepares for a significant leadership transition: John Ternus, the current hardware engineering chief, will succeed Tim Cook as CEO on September 1, 2026.
Monday 4 May 2026
Asia Optical 1Q26 revenue, profit hit record highs on AI cooling and optics growth
Asia Optical reported its first-quarter 2026 financial results, posting consolidated revenue of NT$6.21 billion (approx. US$196.43 million), up 15% year-over-year. Gross profit rose 16% from a year earlier to NT$1.07 billion, while operating income increased 58% from the first quarter of 2025 to NT$482 million, marking record highs for all three for the same period.
Monday 4 May 2026
MIT Technology Review outlines 10 key AI trends shaping the future
In the fast-moving and often noisy world of AI, what truly merits attention? MIT Technology Review has long tracked the field's evolution to map its next directions. Their latest annual insight highlights 10 key themes that capture major AI trends, breakthroughs, and shifts in power dynamics driving innovation today and shaping tomorrow's possibilities.
Monday 4 May 2026
India roundup: India accelerates AI, semiconductor, and manufacturing push with major investments and startup bets

India's technology ecosystem is seeing rapid expansion across AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and electronics manufacturing. From startup bets on AI inference to multi-billion-dollar data center plans and OSAT capacity buildouts, global and domestic players are deepening commitments. The momentum underscores India's rising role in supply chains and compute-driven industries.

Sunday 3 May 2026
Silicon Motion posts record 1Q26 revenue driven by AI, new products to boost growth
Silicon Motion Technology reported a record quarterly revenue of US$342 million in the first quarter of 2026, up 23% from the previous quarter and soaring 105% year-over-year. The company posted a gross margin of 47.2%, net income after tax of US$53.9 million, and diluted earnings per American depository share (ADS) of US$1.58. CEO Wallace Kou said that ongoing ramp-ups of new projects and market share gains will drive quarterly revenue growth throughout 2026.
Sunday 3 May 2026
Taiwan supplier JPC takes No. 2 spot in Nvidia Vera Rubin power cable certification
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to drive power demands, investment in power-related sectors has become a key focus for component suppliers. Connector and cable supplier JPC Connectivity announced a major breakthrough in its power cable business during its earnings call on April 28, confirming that its ORV3 series of products have completed validation by major cloud service providers (CSP) and Taiwanese ODMs, and have entered the mass production and shipment phases.
Saturday 2 May 2026
OpenAI reworks Stargate data center strategy as site plans change

OpenAI is reworking its US$500 billion Stargate initiative, shifting from a fixed data center joint venture toward a more flexible strategy for securing computing capacity as demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure accelerates.

Saturday 2 May 2026
NSTC forms task force to lead Taiwan's multimodal AI foundation model development
Amid the flourishing commercial generative AI landscape dominated by large-parameter language models, Taiwan's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has reversed earlier doubts about its Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) project. NSTC minister Cheng-Wen Wu has instructed the formation of a TAIDE task force led by Mark Liao, director of Academia Sinica's Institute of Information Science, to develop a multimodal foundational AI model supporting diverse industries across Taiwan.
Saturday 2 May 2026
Lite-On profit rises on surge in AI-driven cloud demand

Lite-On Technology reported first-quarter revenue of NT$43.4 billion (approx. US$1.35 billion), up 19% from a year earlier, as surging demand for AI infrastructure fueled rapid growth in its cloud-related business.

Saturday 2 May 2026
Foxconn Industrial Internet posts 102% net profit growth in 1Q26 on AI GPU, ASIC demand
Benefiting from the continued expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) computing power demand, Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII), a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn), reported first-quarter 2026 revenue that far exceeded market expectations. Revenue reached CNY251.08 billion (approx. US$36.74 billion), up 56.52% year over year, while net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company reached CNY10.60 billion, soaring 102.55%, with profit growth significantly outpacing revenue.
Saturday 2 May 2026
MediaTek lifts 2026 ASIC target to $2 billion despite smartphone market deterioration
MediaTek held its earnings call on April 30, expressing a cautious outlook for the 2026 smartphone market. Despite this, growth in other applications is expected to effectively offset the decline.
Friday 1 May 2026
Samsung Electro-Mechanics weighs MLCC price hike of 5–10% as supply tightens
Samsung Electro-Mechanics is considering raising prices for multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) by about 5% to 10% as demand from artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure tightens supply, according to Korean media reports and industry sources.
Friday 1 May 2026
Column: Designing safety for VLA robots in commercial deployment
The deployment density of service and mobile robots in commercial environments has surged over the past three years. What began as narrowly defined automation—inspection units in factories or delivery bots in controlled settings—has expanded into restaurants, retail stores, hospitals, warehouses, and even outdoor logistics. Yet despite this rapid proliferation, most of these machines still operate on rigid rules and pre-programmed workflows, closer to moving appliances than adaptive systems.
Friday 1 May 2026
Hardware bottlenecks emerge as humanoid robotics race intensifies
Competition in humanoid robotics has intensified in recent years, with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning often cited as the main drivers of progress. However, attention is increasingly turning to hardware limitations—particularly actuators used in robotic hands and arms—which some industry participants argue remain the key barrier to achieving human-level dexterity and commercial viability.
Friday 1 May 2026
Commentary: Honor's robot win highlights thermal edge in robotics
The Beijing Humanoid Robot Half Marathon has concluded, but its outcome has ignited a wider industry debate. Rather than a leading robotics specialist, smartphone maker Honor emerged as the unexpected winner — raising questions over whether the company's success reflects genuine technological strength or exposes lower-than-expected barriers in the humanoid robotics sector.
Thursday 30 April 2026
AGI, Inc. advances on-device agentic AI strategy as it targets cross-platform automation
AGI, Inc., also known as The AGI Company, is a San Francisco–based applied AI startup developing what it describes as "on-device superintelligence" for smartphones, computers and browsers. In the emerging agentic AI era, the company focuses on systems that go beyond generating responses and instead execute real-world tasks on behalf of users.
Thursday 30 April 2026
Google's split TPU chips signal shift from universal to specialized AI accelerators
Google has unveiled its eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) by splitting them into two distinct chips: the training-focused TPU 8t and the inference-optimized TPU 8i. This move goes beyond simply designing two chips; it reflects Google's capability to break down bottlenecks across different stages of the model lifecycle, restructuring chip design, interconnects, memory, scheduling, and software stacks.
Thursday 30 April 2026
Korea's 'father of HBM' sees 1,000x AI memory surge as Google's TurboQuant faces real-world tests
Alphabet's Google has unveiled its KV cache quantization compression technology, TurboQuant, promising dramatic reductions in memory usage for AI inference. While the innovation has captured global attention, South Korea's academic and industrial sectors remain skeptical about its practical feasibility, even as they firmly expect AI inference to continue driving substantial growth in memory demand.
Thursday 30 April 2026
MetaX GPU revenue jumps 75%, losses narrow on AI demand
China-based GPU developer MetaX reported a solid start to 2026, underscoring how domestic high-performance GPUs are beginning to translate technical progress into tangible commercial traction.