ON April 29, Amazon reported first-quarter results that exceeded expectations on key metrics, supported by continued strength in its cloud and advertising businesses. Revenue rose to about US$181.5 billion, while operating income increased to roughly US$23.9 billion, reflecting steady expansion across core segments. Net income also climbed significantly on both a quarterly and annual basis.

The AI wave is driving the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure, fundamentally reshaping server rack power transmission designs amid rising power consumption. This shift is triggering a surge in demand and specification upgrades for power interconnect products.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently stated that Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) do not constitute a real threat to Nvidia. He made the comments during an interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he also addressed the company's rise to a US$4 trillion market value in the large language model (LLM) era and the competitive landscape of AI chips.

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te has pledged to transform Taiwan into an "AI island," with a key focus on developing an all-photonic network (APN). The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is acquiring APN technology from Japan's NTT and collaborating with Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) and Accton Technology to advance this initiative. Industry experts say the APN is designed to support applications through low latency and enhanced computing resilience, in line with government goals for digital robustness and computing backup.

Chinese components maker BYD Electronics saw a drop in profits for the first quarter of 2026. The subsidiary of EV maker BYD reported its first-quarter results on April 28, including a 95.5% annual drop in profit attributable to its parent company, hitting CNY27.83 million (US$4.1 million).

Supermicro's new 32.8-acre Silicon Valley campus will add hundreds of US positions and expand domestic production of AI infrastructure, signaling increased US capacity for enterprises and cloud providers worldwide. The expansion may affect global AI deployment timelines and supply-chain choices by boosting domestic system design, manufacturing, testing, and distribution capabilities.

China's GPU startups, including Moore Threads, MetaX, and Biren, are gaining ground in the AI accelerator market. But as demand shifts from training to inference, cluster stability, software maturity, and cost efficiency are emerging as the real constraints.

Memory distributor Supreme Electronics (Supreme) saw its revenue double in the first quarter of 2026, driven by a sharp rise in memory prices. DRAM and Flash accounted for nearly 90% of total sales, with server revenue share reaching about 40%—surpassing mobile for the first time. Strong demand from cloud service providers (CSPs) is driving server memory prices higher, a trend expected to extend into the second quarter of 2026.

The global AI industry is shifting into an inference cost war in 2026, with DeepSeek V4 accelerating changes across China's semiconductor supply chain. By positioning Huawei's Ascend chips as viable alternatives to Nvidia GPUs, DeepSeek reframes competition beyond software versus hardware. The shift cuts deeper, reshaping how AI systems are architected from the ground up.

Google has pledged up to US$40 billion to Anthropic — US$10 billion upfront and US$30 billion contingent — reshaping global AI competition by tying compute access to funding. For international enterprises and policymakers, the deal signals that cloud providers are increasingly using capital to secure AI customers and influence which models dominate the next phase of AI development.

A global surge in artificial intelligence computing is accelerating demand for advanced semiconductors and reinforcing Taiwan's near-term economic momentum, even as leading indicators soften.

Rising AI server power density is forcing data centers to adopt centralized, higher-voltage power and upgraded cooling, with implications for operators, suppliers, and investors. Shifts toward 400V and 800V DC distribution, centralized power racks, and broader adoption of liquid cooling will affect design costs, efficiency, and worldwide supply-chain competition and resilience.

OpenAI is confronting a growing tension between its aggressive infrastructure spending and signs of softer-than-expected business momentum, as internal targets for both user growth and revenue have reportedly been missed.

On April 28, Nvidia introduced Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, a new open multimodal AI model designed to simplify the development of agent-based systems by combining vision, audio, and language capabilities into a single framework.

As the conflict involving the US, Israel, and Iran enters its second month, a fragile ceasefire has tempered immediate market shocks, yet economists warn that prolonged tensions could still ripple through global energy and trade. For Taiwan, however, strong export momentum — driven by surging demand for AI and semiconductor technologies — has so far cushioned the impact.

After China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) banned Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus, the social media giant is reportedly preparing to unwind the deal and allow the founding team to exit in compliance with the cancellation. Original investors, including Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund, have pledged cooperation should Meta finalize the termination.

Taiwanese artificial intelligence (AI) software company Osense Technology is targeting the rapidly growing sports technology market — valued at more than US$10 billion — by independently developing a domestically produced baseball hawk-eye system and smart bullpen training solution.

Quantum computing has long been regarded as one of the defining technology races of the coming decade — and Taiwan, a global powerhouse in semiconductor manufacturing, is now making its most deliberate move yet to stake a claim. Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) on April 27 established the Quantum Industry Technology Promotion Office (QITPO), naming 18 companies as potential participants in a bid to accelerate the island's development of the quantum computing sector.

OpenAI updated its five core operational principles in late April 2026, replacing its 2018 founding charter and framing a new stance on democratization, empowerment, universal prosperity, resilience, and adaptability.

The shift from model training to real-time inference, driven by open-source agent applications, is reshaping global data center design and supplier dynamics, with implications for cloud providers and hardware makers worldwide. Demand for inference-dedicated systems is accelerating production and favoring manufacturers with liquid-cooling and vertical-integration capabilities across the industry.

The global competition in open-source large language models is heating up again. On April 28, Xiaomi officially unveiled the "MiMo-V2.5" series of models developed under the leadership of Fuli Luo, a former core member of DeepSeek and current head of Xiaomi's MiMo large model team. The lineup includes the flagship MiMo-V2.5-Pro and the general-purpose MiMo-V2.5 model.

Amid global supply chain restructuring, Asia's PCB industry is moving toward closer regional collaboration. Industry experts say that as southbound expansion in the PCB sector takes shape, the next phase for Thailand's PCB industry will shift from capacity expansion to accelerating the development of an advanced manufacturing ecosystem. Future competitiveness will hinge on localizing supply chains, developing talent, and continuously improving related supporting infrastructure and systems.

Nvidia has signed a 10-year lease for approximately 760,000 square feet of office space in Bengaluru, marking the largest single-tenant office commitment in India to date. The space, located at Bagmane Capital's Memphis South Tower in Mahadevpura, spans 12 floors and will serve as a major hub for the company's expanding artificial intelligence (AI) and engineering operations.