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Thursday 3 September 2026
Fei-Fei Li's World Labs unveils Atlas world model for 3D AI and robotics

World Labs, the startup founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled Atlas, a multimodal world model designed to generate, reconstruct, and simulate three-dimensional environments from text, images, and video. The launch marks a shift from conventional generative AI toward systems that reason about geometry, camera position, depth, and spatial relationships.

Thursday 3 September 2026
Semiconductor sustainability shifts to cost control as fab resource demand surges

Sustainability is not just good for communities and the environment but also good for business. This is the message from a sustainability summit that took place at SEMICON Taiwan this week, with water management and equipment providers seeking to link water recycling, tool upgrades, and efficiency-improving automation to measurable cost savings.

Thursday 3 September 2026
Microsoft unveils two-segment reporting structure, standalone Azure financials
Microsoft has unveiled its consolidation of its operating segments from three down to two: Agents and Infra alongside Devices and Consumer. The tech giant also announced plans to disclose standalone quarterly revenue for its Azure cloud unit.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Solomon leverages AI vision and optical tech to tap semiconductor inspection market
Solomon Technology, a Taiwanese artificial intelligence (AI) 3D vision company, is showcasing two key inspection applications that integrate its core AI vision and optical technologies at Semicon Taiwan 2026. The applications include full-wafer warpage detection inside front-opening unified pods (FOUP)/cassettes and through-glass via (TGV) aperture defect inspection technology, aimed at preventing equipment downtime during manufacturing processes and ensuring the yield and quality of next-generation advanced packaging.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Taiwan's supply chain is 'one of a kind,' MediaTek CEO says
MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai said Taiwan's supply-chain capabilities are unmatched as the technology industry moves into the AI and robotics era, while joking that the chip designer will need significantly more capacity in the years ahead.
Thursday 3 September 2026
AUO unit eyes TSMC ecosystem as merger benefits emerge
AUO Group's AET Corporation (AET), formed in September 2025 through the merger of AUO Envirotech and AUO Digitech, is expanding across the semiconductor supply chain and has reportedly entered the ecosystem of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). After the merger, AET's core operations turned profitable in 2025, and the company is targeting a full-year profit in 2026.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Google to expand Taipei AI infrastructure center as Taiwan ties deepen
Google will expand its AI infrastructure research and development center in Taipei's Shilin district, adding 60% more office space, as it deepens work with Taiwan's supply chain on next-generation computing. The move underscores Taiwan's growing role in global AI development, where chip, cooling, and data-center advances affect users worldwide.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Broadcom puts 30GW, US$350 billion of custom AI silicon on the calendar through fiscal 2028
Broadcom used its third-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call on September 2 to convert a quarter-by-quarter AI story into a dated, customer-by-customer deployment schedule running into fiscal 2029. Chief executive Hock Tan told analysts that across the company's six XPU customers there is demand for 30GW of accelerated compute in fiscal 2027 and 2028 combined, and that Broadcom expects to ship "US$350 billion of AI semiconductors to these customers in the next two years." He was explicit that not all 30GW will come online inside those two fiscal years — "we judge it conservatively to be somewhat less" — and that the revenue figures, not the gigawatt figures, are the commitment.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Auras sees ASIC revenue reaching 50% in 2027, eyes microchannel cooling production in 2028
Cooling specialist Auras Technology is expanding from GPU platforms to ASIC-related products as its next growth driver, amid the ongoing shift toward liquid cooling in AI servers, with chairman Steve Lin highlighting sustained progress in projects for major international cloud service providers (CSP) such as AWS and Meta.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Column: From automation to autonomy—what robotics still needs to make the leap
I visited Automation Taipei 2026 in mid-August, where the show looked lively and occupied a footprint 7% larger than in 2025. Physical AI and vision-language-action (VLA) models dominated the venue. Yet most robots on display still repeated fixed motions behind barriers, highlighting how far robotics has to go to move from automation to autonomy.
Thursday 3 September 2026
SK Hynix wafer purchases jump 104% on AI demand
SK Hynix boosted its silicon wafer purchases in the second quarter of 2026 by more than doubling spending from the previous quarter as it moved early to secure raw materials amid rising wafer prices and surging AI demand. The increase drew more attention than Samsung Electronics' modest rise over the same period.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Thailand AiPASS unlocks premium AI after lessons
Thailand has launched its TH-AI Passport and core AiPASS platform, taking a different path from South Korea's national AI push by buying access to overseas commercial AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude and offering them free to citizens. The move aims to expand AI access while addressing the country's widening AI usage gap.
Thursday 3 September 2026
MiniMax, Z.ai revenues surge on API demand but adjusted losses widen
Two of China's first listed foundation-model developers are showing that demand for their technology can translate into rapidly growing revenue. Turning that demand into profit remains a much harder problem.
Thursday 3 September 2026
TIME AI 100 spotlights China's new AI guard, from Moonshot, Z.ai to AgiBot, Manus
TIME recently unveiled its 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI. Alongside leaders of major technology companies, the list includes a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs spanning AI models, humanoid robots, and AI agents, highlighting how China's AI industry is expanding beyond large language models into a broader range of technologies and applications.
Thursday 3 September 2026
SEMICON Taiwan 2026: Physical AI drives new demand for multimodal robot sensing
The rise of physical AI is creating a new wave of demand for advanced sensors as robots move from controlled demonstrations toward practical deployment. Industry experts at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 said robots will need increasingly diverse sensing capabilities to perceive, interpret, and respond to complex real-world environments in real time.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Yield has been semiconductor industry's oldest question; now it's Microsoft's test for AI
Microsoft brought the semiconductor industry's own measure of success back to it on Wednesday, and argued that AI will be judged by it.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Sandisk says HBF can match HBM bandwidth with up to 16x the capacity
Sandisk says its NAND-based High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) technology can match HBM bandwidth while providing eight to 16 times the capacity at a similar cost, positioning flash memory closer to processors as inference workloads strain conventional memory systems.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Lam Research exec says automated preventive maintenance key to fabs of the future
A senior Lam Research executive told an industry audience this week that the next major leap in semiconductor manufacturing will not come from removing humans entirely from fabs, but from pairing collaborative robots with AI-driven predictive maintenance to close a long-standing gap in fab operations.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
DRAM giants target 3D stacking to break memory wall and power bottlenecks
At a shared stage at Semicon Taiwan 2026, executives from Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron agreed that traditional 2.5D high-bandwidth memory (HBM) using interposers is approaching a performance ceiling. Consequently, the industry is transitioning toward 3D vertical stacking architectures to minimize transmission power consumption and leverage wafer-level bonding technologies.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Semicon Taiwan 2026 to test cloud AI investment boom
Cloud AI capital expenditure continues to shatter market expectations, sparking growing concerns over whether the spending surge is overheating and heading toward a bubble. Semicon Taiwan 2026 may serve as the ultimate litmus test for this debate.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Wonderful Hi-Tech expands Thailand, Vietnam capacity to capture emerging space data center, physical AI demand
Cable manufacturer Wonderful Hi-Tech announced its financial results for the second quarter and first half of 2026 during an earnings call held on September 1. A ramp-up in high-speed transmission cable shipments for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, coupled with strong pull-in momentum from a major US low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite customer, drove second-quarter results. The company also said it is expanding capacity in Thailand and Vietnam to capture new opportunities in space data centers and physical AI.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
World's first legged robot standard sets global benchmark for humanoids, robot dogs
China-led experts have released what CCTV described as the world's first international standard for legged robots, creating a common framework for evaluating humanoid robots, robot dogs and other machines designed to walk, run, climb slopes and cross obstacles.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Indium CEO: packaging, cooling and power are next AI bottlenecks
As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) continue to drive semiconductor advances, industry competition is shifting beyond chip performance toward packaging, cooling, assembly, and power delivery. With GPUs, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and advanced packaging pushing power density higher, chipmakers now face challenges that extend well beyond silicon manufacturing, including managing thermal expansion, warpage, heat dissipation, and reliability across heterogeneously integrated materials.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Certain Micro targets AI test-interface demand with three Semicon products
As Semicon Taiwan 2026 gets underway, semiconductor test-interface structural parts maker Certain Micro Application Technology (CMAT) announced three core product lines aimed at rising AI and high-performance computing (HPC) chip testing demand: fine drilling for upper and lower guide plates, probe card structural components, and ATE Stiffener test frames.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Energy and water: How to tackle the fab resource crunch
As artificial intelligence demand drives astronomical growth in advanced chip manufacturing, the semiconductor industry is hitting critical resource bottlenecks. Speaking at SEMICON Taiwan 2026, leaders from Ecolab and Edwards Vacuum warned on September 2 that continuing with current water and energy practices is unsustainable.