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Tuesday 24 March 2026

Why Switzerland chose a bottom-up approach over big tech grandstanding

During the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an impassioned case for digital sovereignty. "Build your own AI, take advantage of your fundamental natural resource, which is your language and culture," he urged. "Develop your AI, continue to refine it, and have your national intelligence part of your ecosystem."

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Sharp taps BD chief as CEO in post-restructuring shift

Sharp Corporation, a subsidiary of Foxconn, has named its Chief Business Development Officer, Tetsuji Kawamura, as its next president and CEO, placing an executive with deep overseas and new-business experience at the helm as the Japanese electronics maker pivots from restructuring toward growth.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

WWDC26: Apple signals AI maturity and 'charm approach' to China amid Tim Cook's visit

Apple officially confirmed on Monday that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will return from June 8 to June 12, 2026. While the core experience remains online and free for its 34-million-strong developer community, the company is doubling down on a hybrid strategy, hosting a marquee in-person event at Apple Park on opening day.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Analysis: How Nvidia is reshuffling partners for the inference era

On August 15, 2023, a routine press release landed in the inboxes of semiconductor analysts and tech journalists worldwide. Titled "Groq Selects Samsung Foundry to Bring Next-gen LPU to the AI Acceleration Market," it presented a classic David-versus-Goliath narrative.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

AI boom lifts substrate maker Kinsus as prices and demand rise

Buoyed by strong demand from makers of AI GPUs, CPUs, and application-specific chips, Kinsus Interconnect Technology said it expects a sharp lift in both revenue and product mix as new capacity for ABF substrates comes online.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

MediaTek's Airoha takes on US giants in optical comms DSP chip arena

The expansion of AI data centers is creating new business opportunities that are opening the door for upstarts to challenge industry leaders. A prime example is the four-level pulse amplitude modulation digital signal processing (PAM4 DSP) chip market for optical communications, which is shifting from a duopoly dominated by US leaders Marvell Technology and Broadcom to a more diversified vendor landscape. MediaTek's subsidiary Airoha is now striving to climb this competitive ladder.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

China's AI GPUs face equipment and software constraints, but system-level design boosts self-reliance

Although it may appear that China's AI GPU development is behind the US by one or more generations, a recent Morgan Stanley report reveals the actual gap is smaller than widely perceived.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

OpenClaw lands in WeChat, signaling a new era of AI agents in messaging

Tencent has officially launched ClawBot, a plugin that integrates the popular open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw into its flagship messaging platform, WeChat, marking a significant move in China's AI race. The integration allows WeChat's over one billion monthly active users to send commands and interact with OpenClaw directly within their chat interface, turning conversations into actionable AI interactions. Setup takes just two minutes via a QR code scan or a copied command.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Alibaba unveils XuanTie C950 and C925, advancing RISC-V into AI and edge computing

Alibaba's DAMO Academy has introduced two new RISC-V processors—the flagship XuanTie C950 and the energy-efficient C925—marking a significant step in pushing the open-source architecture into both high-performance AI and edge applications.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Excellence Optoelectronics accelerates Mexico plant ramp-up, eyes robot and ECU markets

Excellence Optoelectronics (EOI) is preparing for volume production to begin in July at its soon-to-be-completed Phase 1 plant in Mexico, aiming for an 80% utilization rate by year-end with 88 LED automotive lighting modules produced at the new facility. The company has also seen stellar results from its new AI smart city and system integration businesses, and expects the combined driving force of automotive and AI to propel steady revenue growth throughout 2026, after posting strong results for a usually slow first quarter.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Trump administration's 'Pax Silica' fund to strengthen global semiconductor and AI supply chains

The Trump administration set up a US$250 million fund intended to grow out of its "Pax Silica" initiative launched in December 2025, aimed at supporting global supply chains for semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), and critical minerals, according to the New York Times. The fund represents the first step in a voluntary consortium that could attract up to US$1 trillion in investments from allies, including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Britain, and Australia, with the US committing US$250 million.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

TSMC's Wei draws battle lines between US AI and China's hardware in robotics race

TSMC chairman C.C. Wei's recent remarks on the global robotics landscape have sparked an industry debate over whether the US or China holds the upper hand in the race to commercialize humanoid robots.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Nvidia opens server racks to rival chips, expanding cloud infrastructure role

Nvidia is expanding its role in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure by designing server racks that can accommodate processors from its competitors, according to a report by The Information, citing people familiar with the matter.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Huawei's Ascend 950PR debuts with nearly 3x H20 performance, targets China's AI compute gap

Huawei has officially launched its Ascend 950PR processor and introduced the Atlas 350 AI accelerator card equipped with this chip, marking the commercial debut of its next-generation inference computing platform. At Huawei China Partner Conference 2026, the company showcased the Ascend 950PR AI chip, highlighting that a single Atlas 350 card delivers up to 2.87x the compute power of Nvidia's H20, emphasizing its FP4 low-precision inference capabilities, a rare feature among AI accelerators in the Chinese market.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Small nations face structural limits in AI sovereignty, Swiss expert says

As global momentum builds around "sovereign AI," smaller economies face structural constraints in achieving technological independence, particularly in compute infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Commentary: From chip performance to inference economics, Jensen Huang rewrites AI industry trends at GTC

Over the past three years, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has returned to the same two-axis chart at each annual GTC conference — but the story that chart tells has shifted dramatically, from a technical argument aimed at engineers to a financial argument aimed at CEO and boards of directors. That evolution is not accidental. It is a deliberate, multi-year strategy to elevate Nvidia's compute platform procurement from a line item in an IT budget to a question of corporate competitiveness.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

The chip gap: How Alibaba is pulling away from Tencent in China's AI arms race

Alibaba Group has been quietly building something big. Over recent years, it has pushed steadily into in-house chip development — moving from design and research all the way to large-scale commercialization, all in a bid to cut reliance on external suppliers.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

2026 SelectUSA Investment Summit to spotlight Taiwan-US trade and investment ties

The upcoming SelectUSA investment summit is approaching, and Taiwanese firms are expected to be a major presence as they seek to integrate more closely with the US market. As the Taiwanese government continues encouraging its companies to "go east" by investing in the US to drive business growth, many firms are eager to seize this opportunity to better understand the American market and how to manage local supply chains.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Interview: The quantum clock is ticking — here's which industries need to move now

Enterprises have a 2035 deadline. That is when the US government expects companies to have completed their migration to post-quantum cryptography — a safeguard against the encryption-breaking capabilities that quantum computers will eventually possess. But long before that reckoning arrives, quantum technology is already opening doors in finance, pharmaceuticals, and materials science. Ching-Ray Chang, director of CYCU's Quantum Information Center and a Global Quantum 100 honoree, maps out the road ahead at AI Expo Taiwan.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Commentary: Trump's Middle East AI data center push under threat from Iran conflict

In May 2025, US President Donald Trump led a major investment delegation to the Middle East targeting key allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The delegation included Silicon Valley leaders from OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. This trip underscored the region's strategic focus on AI-driven economic growth through data centers.

Tuesday 24 March 2026

Ghost Robotics seeks Taiwan supply chain ties for quadruped robots

Ghost Robotics, a US-based developer of quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), has expressed interest in collaborating with Taiwan's supply chain as it moves to enter the local market. Discussions between the two sides are already at an advanced stage, according to supply chain sources.

Monday 23 March 2026

Meet the duo bridging Jensen Huang to Taiwan at GTC 2026

At Nvidia's GTC 2026 conference last week, two figures were notable in helping CEO Jensen Huang connect with major Taiwanese business partners.

Monday 23 March 2026

Brinno targets growth with time-lapse, visual AI, and defense imaging push for 2026

Brinno outlined time-lapse photography, visual AI, and defense imaging as its three core business pillars for 2026 at a spring banquet on March 20, saying the focus will accelerate R&D investment and growth through its global distributor network.

Monday 23 March 2026

Arm targets China's physical AI market post-strategic restructuring

Widely known for its mobile IP business, Arm has recently accelerated its push into the physical AI segment in China, following its expansion into the data center market and a strategic reorganization.

Monday 23 March 2026

Tescan integrates Seoul demo lab to speed testing for AI memory and advanced packaging customers

Tescan's expansion of its Seoul site integrates a Demo Lab with office space to better serve semiconductor clients amid global AI-driven memory demand, promising faster failure analysis and reliability testing for advanced packaging customers worldwide and reducing testing wait times for partners pursuing heterogeneous integration and chiplet technologies.

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