Plug and Play has closed a 6 billion Japanese yen fund — approximately US$40 million — making it one of the largest first-time seed funds ever raised in Japan, the firm announced on the first day of the Plug and Play May Summit in Sunnyvale.

Saeed Amidi, founder and CEO of Plug and Play, opened the first day of the Plug and Play May Summit in Sunnyvale with a characteristically freewheeling address that wove together billion-dollar announcements, geopolitical asides and a running joke about his wife's online shopping habits — but beneath the humor was a substantive strategic pivot.

At the Plug and Play Silicon Valley May Summit 2026, industry leaders from Sony, Nvidia, and USC gathered to discuss the next phase of the AI revolution during the opening panel discussion, "AI Beyond the Hype: Who Actually Wins the Next Decade?" The consensus was clear: while infrastructure giants laid the groundwork, the next wave of massive disruption will occur in vertical applications.

Sarthak Vaish, associate partner at McKinsey & Company, delivered a pointed reality check at the 5th Mobis Mobility Day in Sunnyvale: the hardware for humanoid robots is ready, but the organizations meant to deploy them are not.

Dell Technologies has added 1,000 customers over the past quarter for its AI Factory servers, which use Nvidia chips and software to power AI applications for enterprises. The hardware company has been working to establish itself as a go-to partner for traditional businesses looking to weave AI into their workloads.

A jury has ruled in OpenAI's favor in a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk that laid bare the personal feud between the world's richest man and the AI company's leadership. The jurors found that Musk had exceeded the statute of limitations for suing OpenAI, clearing the way for a potential IPO this year.

Flexible copper clad laminate (FCCL) manufacturer Asia Electric Material (AEM) said that its long-term investment in new product development has begun to yield results, with the company's operational focus shifting toward product promotion and customer sample certification in 2026. Its two major new products will target the semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) application markets.

Japanese electronic components manufacturer TDK will make its largest-ever capital investment in fiscal 2026, running from April 2026 to March 2027, to address surging demand related to artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on batteries, hard disk drive (HDD) components, and multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC).

Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has awarded subsidies to three research and development projects, approving NT$100 million (US$3.16 million) for Solomon's humanoid robot Vision-Language-Action technology on May 18. The grants were approved at the sixth final review meeting of the ministry's A+ Enterprise Innovation R&D Tempering Program, which helps companies share R&D costs and risks through expert review and direct funding.

Analog Devices Inc. is in advanced talks to acquire Empower Semiconductor for about US$1.5 billion in cash, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A formal announcement could come as soon as Tuesday. The deal has not been finalized and could still fall through.

Shortly after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left China following a delegation led by US President Donald Trump, Beijing officials swiftly announced a meeting with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su, drawing market attention to a possible shift in the atmosphere surrounding US-China AI chip cooperation.

Google's announcement for the upcoming Googlebook, which tightly integrates Gemini features, signals that it is no longer limiting its PC strategy to the Chromebook line and is pushing into a higher-end product tier in the AI PC era. Chipmakers, including Intel on the x86 side and Qualcomm and MediaTek on the Arm side, are also joining the race, further intensifying competition in the AI PC market.

Alphabet's Google and Blackstone are planning to launch a new artificial intelligence cloud company that would use Google's proprietary AI chips to compete in the fast-growing AI infrastructure market, according to reports from Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal.

Nvidia's fanless Vera Rubin AI server racks, slated for mass production in the second half of 2026, are expected to accelerate global adoption of liquid cooling across server components, creating demand beyond GPUs for CPUs, memory, network cards, and switches, and reshaping thermal management supply chains worldwide and vendor economics.

Chinese officials have renewed calls to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) more deeply into manufacturing as Beijing seeks to modernize traditional industries, strengthen industrial competitiveness, and cultivate new growth drivers.

Baidu said its core AI businesses became the majority of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2026, driven by rapid growth in AI cloud infrastructure, expanded foundation-model support on its model-as-a-service platform Qianfan, and stronger commercial adoption of its Kunlunxin AI chips.

Analysts offered mixed assessments of Baidu after the Chinese internet company posted first-quarter revenue that topped market expectations, with some pointing to stronger AI monetization. In contrast, others warned that profitability remains under pressure from rising investment and lower-margin AI businesses.

Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, a specialized version of its Claude generative AI designed to integrate directly with law firms' existing tools and workflows, the company announced. The offering arrives as legal use cases have surged on Claude, and it targets contract analysis, litigation support, employment, intellectual property, and privacy compliance workflows.

Anthropic urged US policymakers to tighten chip export controls and pass legislation banning so-called distillation attacks, warning that failure to act could allow China to shape global AI rules by 2028. In a recent policy report, the AI developer said that compute capacity remains the decisive factor in the US-China AI competition and that existing export controls have given the US a current lead.

CyCraft announced an expansion of its Japan strategy at its CyCraft Day Japan partner summit, teaming with local cybersecurity providers, including NTT Security and Future Secure Wave, to offer AI-managed security services amid rising geopolitical risks and supply chain attacks. The vendor said more than 20 Japanese cybersecurity service providers and 70 representatives from industry, government, and academia attended the event, where CyCraft outlined a shift from channel sales to local value creation in Japan.

Anthropic agreed to brief members of the Financial Stability Board, the G20 body for finance officials and central bank governors, on the cyber risk profile of its Claude Mythos model after a request from the Bank of England governor, sources told Financial Times. The sessions will explain how Mythos can automatically uncover cybersecurity vulnerabilities across global banks and financial systems and outline the model's potential impact on cyber defenses and financial stability.

OpenAI said it has crossed 900 million weekly active users for ChatGPT and completed a US$12.2 billion private financing round at the end of March, but executives signaled the company may seek additional capital as compute demand outstrips available resources. A spokesperson said the firm raised the historic sum to provide flexibility, yet future funding decisions will hinge on demand growth, revenue performance, cash flow, and whether the compute gap can be closed.

Acer is gaining ground in India's PC market, with the Taiwanese PC vendor citing the latest market data showing it ranked second in the country in the first quarter of 2026.

Silergy, a major power management IC (PMIC) supplier, said its new Gen4 products ramped ahead of schedule in the first half of the year, as tight PMIC supply supported growth in AI and automotive markets. Chairman Wei Chen said the company's revenue for the first quarter of 2026 came in better than expected, while gross margin was slightly below expectations due to product-mix changes.