The traditional hard disk drive (HDD) market experienced a rare sharp price surge in recent years. In contract price negotiations for the fourth quarter of 2025, HDD product prices were finalized with a quarter-over-quarter increase of approximately 4%, marking the highest growth rate in the past eight quarters.

Samsung Electronics is reportedly in talks with Advanced Micro Devices about producing next-generation chips using its second-generation 2nm process, as the South Korean technology group seeks to secure major customers and revive its loss-making foundry business, according to industry sources and reports from South Korea's Seoul Economic Daily and G-enews.

Following the Trump administration's recent easing of export restrictions on Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, several Chinese technology firms, such as Alibaba and ByteDance, have reportedly expressed significant interest in placing large-scale orders. Nvidia is now evaluating whether to increase production capacity of the H200 chips to meet this potential surge in demand, according to Reuters, citing unnamed sources.

Analysts believe that the performance outlook for 2026 from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Broadcom offers a glimpse into the expected performance of South Korea's two semiconductor leaders, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

These are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories in the week of December 8 to December 14, 2025.

As India intensifies its efforts to become a global semiconductor hub, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has expressed support for the country's strategy of pursuing incremental progress, focusing initially on legacy node fabrication for automotive and industrial applications.

As major US CSPs are ramping up ASIC development, the capacity gap in TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging continues to widen. Thus, the rise of "CoWoS-like" capacity by OSAT providers has emerged. To address the strong demand for advanced packaging capacity from AI GPU and ASIC vendors, and as IC design houses increasingly introduce second suppliers to enhance supply chain resilience, TSMC is expected to begin expanding the release of Chip-on-Wafer (CoW) packaging process orders to OSAT providers starting in 2026-2027.

The Shenzhen 8K UHD Video Industry Cooperation Alliance (SUCA) said China's domestically developed General-Purpose Multimedia Interface (GPMI) standard is set for formal release.

The US government is rethinking the impact of Washington's decision to clear Nvidia's H200 exports to China after a Financial Times report suggested Beijing is prioritizing domestically developed AI chips.

Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, reported that Intel Corp. is in advanced discussions to acquire artificial intelligence chip startup SambaNova Systems Inc. for about US$1.6 billion including debt, a move that could significantly bolster Intel's AI product portfolio while reigniting scrutiny over governance and potential conflicts of interest linked to its chief executive.