Seven Chinese silicon wafer producers reported first-half 2026 results in the second half of August, indicating an uneven sector recovery. Several semiconductor-grade wafer makers swung from losses to reported profits, though how much of that improvement came from core operations rather than one-off items varies widely by company. The two solar-wafer producers in the group, meanwhile, remain far deeper in the red amid a separate, unrelated downturn.
Taisic Materials, a subsidiary of Kenmec Mechanical Engineering, has successfully produced Taiwan's first 12-inch silicon carbide (SiC) boule using a crystal growth furnace independently developed by Kenmec.
Semiconductor investment, AI chips, advanced packaging and data center infrastructure dominated the week, with South Korea facing US pressure, India scaling chip manufacturing, and Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Taiwan suppliers advancing new AI and 2nm strategies. Below are the most-read DIGITIMES stories from the week of August 24-30, 2026.
Taiwanese investment projects announced or under implementation in France are worth about EUR7.5 billion (approx. US$8.7 billion), according to the French Office in Taipei, led by ProLogium's battery project and Foxconn's expansion into advanced semiconductor packaging and AI infrastructure.
India's semiconductor ambitions are expanding from packaging and testing to chip design, materials, mobile devices and data centers. New investments by CG Power, Infineon, Foxconn, Samsung and LG highlight rising industrial activity, while skills shortages, environmental constraints and import dependence remain challenges. Government incentives increasingly seek deeper domestic capabilities and higher value creation.
Can Xiaomi's in-house chip reach 2nm? Is HBM rerouting to Malaysia TSMC giving Intel a pass? Can Nvidia hold a 75% gross margin or protect market share? Ahead of Apple's September 10 event, the pre-event technology lull was anything but quiet, and DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin broke down three stories and the industry logic behind them.
Innodisk said its AI-focused product mix is driving stronger revenue and profitability, a sign that global demand for memory and infrastructure hardware remains robust. The company also warned that tight supply and rising prices may continue for years, with implications for AI builders, industrial users, and enterprise customers worldwide.
The AI infrastructure race has spent the past few years fixated on high-bandwidth memory as one of the most indispensable building blocks of accelerated compute. Yet as model sizes, context windows and inference workloads continue to expand, the bottleneck is increasingly shifting from how much memory can be stacked toward how efficiently data can move between memory and compute.
Buried in 238 pages of targets and inventories are the things nobody puts in a press release: a formal corporate policy on shoe soles, a fish that lives in a fab, a lizard evacuation in Germany, and a workforce that is quietly out-reproducing the rest of Taiwan by a factor of four. Nine small stories from the world's most important chipmaker.
(The latest status of the probe as of August 29th is updated below.)
The four major US cloud service providers (CSPs) have already rewritten their 2026 capital expenditure records, and ASIC vendors are increasingly confident that demand will remain strong through 2028 as customer spending and supply-chain visibility both extend farther out.
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