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Thursday 18 June 2026
AI data center boom drives Taiwan passive component makers to record sales
Demand in the passive components market is recovering significantly, lifting operating momentum at Taiwan's two leading suppliers, Yageo and Walsin Technology. Average book-to-bill ratios at both companies have risen above 1.3, placing industry conditions near their highest levels in recent years and reinforcing expectations for sequential growth through 2026.
Thursday 18 June 2026
NIO founder warns China's auto market could shrink by 20% this year
Nio founder and chairman William Li warned at the 2026 China Auto Chongqing Summit that China's auto industry has entered its "most brutal final stage," saying 2026 passenger-vehicle retail sales in China could fall 15% to 20% from last year. He urged the industry to prepare early as the Chinese new energy vehicle market enters a more severe phase of competition.
Thursday 18 June 2026
AI chip boom strains probe card supply, Taiwan test interface maker weighs prepayment deals
MPI Corporation, a major probe card supplier, said AI demand is tightening supply across the probe card market and extending order visibility, with the company considering a prepayment mechanism to guarantee customers priority access to capacity.
Thursday 18 June 2026
Unitree IPO tests China's bet on low-cost humanoid robots

Unitree Robotics is heading toward a Shanghai listing with a pitch drawing attention well beyond China: humanoid robots can be built cheaply enough, and at enough scale, to begin taking on narrow labor tasks.

Thursday 18 June 2026
SpaceX acquires Cursor to bolster xAI and court AI developers

SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding tool developer Cursor for US$60 billion, in a deal that underscores how competition in the AI industry is extending beyond foundation models into the application layer and developer ecosystems. The purchase gives SpaceX direct access to enterprise customers, developer communities, and high-value code data instead of rebuilding a product from scratch. Markets see it as a key addition to Elon Musk's AI strategy.

Thursday 18 June 2026
G7 AI talks reveal trust gap behind US model power
The world's most powerful AI companies entered the G7 summit in France this week with a message for democratic governments: frontier AI needs global rules, but those rules are increasingly being shaped by US strategic interests.
Thursday 18 June 2026
Acer founder outlines New WangDao leadership white paper at Tokyo AI forum

The founder of Acer Group traveled to Tokyo to present a Taiwan-origin leadership framework and release a multilingual white paper on New WangDao at the international AI forum, titled "Global Innovation Reimagined Conference: AI Resilience," on June 17. The white paper was published in Chinese, English and Japanese, and the founder delivered additional briefings to Japanese companies and alumni of Thunderbird School of Global Management on June 18 and June 19, according to event materials.

Thursday 18 June 2026
Samsung said to open fab data to suppliers in AI factory push

Samsung Electronics is developing and operating a data-sharing platform with semiconductor materials, components and equipment suppliers, according to a report by South Korea's ETNews, which cited industry sources.

Thursday 18 June 2026
Meta puts brakes on AI use as token costs hit tech giants
Meta's internal AI costs have spiraled, and a broader pullback in spending by major tech companies is bringing a long-ignored contradiction into focus: the business logic of AI is being undermined by the cost pressure it creates.
Thursday 18 June 2026
Taiwan 2026 GDP could top 10%, says Minister of Economic Affairs
Taiwan's 2026 GDP growth is on track to exceed 10% as AI demand powers the island's economy, Minister of Economic Affairs Ming-hsin Kung said, adding that this level of growth may be achieved given current trends. He pointed to stronger-than-expected exports from the AI supply chain and traditional industries such as machinery.
Thursday 18 June 2026
SK Hynix scraps degree rules to court AI chip talent

SK Hynix has eliminated degree requirements from its regular recruitment process for new employees, as the memory chip giant seeks to strengthen its lead in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and secure talent for the fast-changing AI semiconductor market. Industry watchers said the move reflects a greater focus on practical creativity and execution in the AI era rather than formal academic credentials.

Thursday 18 June 2026
WUS and its subsidiary keep complementary AI partnership
A recent open letter from the UK-based fund Palliser Capital called Taiwanese printed circuit board (PCB) maker WUS Printed Circuit one of the most undervalued AI PCB companies in the capital market. This has once drawn industry attention to the current business cooperation between WUS and its subsidiary in China, WUS Printed Circuit Kunshan.
Thursday 18 June 2026
UC San Diego researchers turn retired Pixel phones into low-cost computing cluster

Backed by Google, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are repurposing retired Pixel phones into a computing cluster that could lower costs and cut e-waste. The project matters far beyond one campus, as it points to a possible model for affordable, local cloud infrastructure that could interest schools and smaller organizations worldwide.

Wednesday 17 June 2026
Commentary: US delays DeepSeek blacklist, exposing AI export-control dilemma
The US has held back from adding Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT, and more than 100 other entities to a key trade blacklist, underscoring Washington's struggle to balance national security controls with a broader effort to contain tensions with Beijing.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
US AI export crackdown on Anthropic sparks global push for sovereign AI
A letter dated June 12 from US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei marked the most aggressive federal regulatory intervention targeting a leading generative AI firm to date, as Bloomberg confirmed.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
Snap unveils Specs AR glasses as AI wearables market expands

Snap unveiled its new Specs augmented reality (AR) glasses at the Augmented World Expo on June 16. Its offering comes at a time when electronics and AI companies are delving into the competitive smart wearables market, with some at very affordable price points.

Wednesday 17 June 2026
WinWay buys California property to support US expansion in AI and HPC
WinWay Technologies has bought real estate in California for US$2.28 million to create a local manufacturing and office base, a move that underscores how Asian suppliers are expanding closer to US customers as demand rises for AI, high-performance computing, and chip testing services worldwide.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
Inside DeepSeek's US$7.4 billion funding raise: China's AI champion keeps investors close and control closer
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has closed its first external funding round, raising more than CNY50 billion (approx. US$7.4 billion) in a deal that values the large-language model developer at more than US$50 billion and makes it China's most valuable AI startup.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
Bull and Foxconn to build Nvidia's latest AI servers in Europe

Bull, the French computing company, and Foxconn announced Tuesday that they will manufacture systems based on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 platform in Europe — the first concrete output of a partnership the two companies unveiled just two weeks ago.

Wednesday 17 June 2026
Li Auto's new automotive chip and what it says about China's EV market

Li Auto announced details of its new Mach M100 chip, a self-developed 5nm chip focused on autonomous driving, on June 15. This development marks the latest entry among Chinese automakers into designing in-house chips as they compete on cost and smart-driving features.

Wednesday 17 June 2026
Alibaba moves Qwen AI into robotics with first embodied intelligence suite
Alibaba Group has unveiled its first suite of artificial intelligence (AI) models for robots, taking its Qwen family beyond chatbots and software agents into machines that can navigate, simulate, and manipulate the physical world.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
SpaceX to acquire Cursor in US$60 billion stock deal after blockbuster IPO
SpaceX has agreed to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco company behind AI coding agent Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing the startup at US$60 billion, giving Elon Musk's newly public company a stronger foothold in enterprise AI tools and software development.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
PCIM 2026: How high-voltage infrastructure is unifying AI and e-mobility sectors
Semiconductor manufacturers, market analysts, and engineering departments have long tracked the clean energy transition through siloed vertical markets. For example, they will calculate individual EV sales on one spreadsheet while tracking hyperscale data center deployments on another. However, during PCIM Europe 2026 in Nuremberg, Germany, industry leaders and experts discussed and dismantled this flawed strategy.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
Nvidia highlights role of optical networking as Coherent breaks ground on Texas AI chip facility
AI infrastructure is increasingly dependent on light, and more of that technology is being built in Texas. Coherent's new Sherman expansion, backed by public and private funding, could strengthen global supply chains for the lasers and optical components that connect data centers, chips, and servers worldwide.
Wednesday 17 June 2026
China cuts AI compute prices, revealing pressure to fill supercomputing capacity
China's state-backed National Supercomputing Internet has launched a 618 computing-power promotion, offering low-priced token packages, free tokens, and discounts on optical character recognition (OCR) services in an effort to draw more enterprises and developers to its AI services.