In an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook made an unusually blunt admission. The company is preparing to raise product prices because memory and storage costs have surged to a point Apple can no longer absorb. He said Apple has spent the past stretch trying to shield customers from these cost increases, but the situation has become "unsustainable."

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is scheduled to visit Assam in northeastern India in early July 2026. According to Nikkei, more than 50 Japanese companies and business groups, including Suzuki, Itochu and Toyota Tsusho, are expected to accompany the delegation, with market attention focused on cooperation in semiconductors and infrastructure.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are each reviewing locations in South Korea's Honam region for new semiconductor packaging plants, according to The Elec and Hankyung, citing industry sources, as the two companies look for ways to add back-end capacity beyond their existing manufacturing hubs.

Taiwan's listed semiconductor manufacturers reported strong May revenue figures, with a sweeping recovery in DRAM prices and rising artificial intelligence infrastructure spending lifting most of the sector's 27 tracked companies to double-digit year-on-year gains.

The global semiconductor and high-tech manufacturing landscape continues to undergo structural realignment. An increasing number of Chinese technology and semiconductor companies are adopting a dual-location strategy, establishing corporate entities in Singapore while locating manufacturing operations in Malaysia in an effort to reduce their association with the "Made in China" label.

A teardown of Huawei's latest Mate 80 Pro Max smartphone has put China's semiconductor progress back under scrutiny, after analysis showed the HiSilicon Kirin 9030 processor was made on SMIC's third-generation 7nm-class N+3 process with a local metal pitch narrower than that of Intel's 18A chip used in Panther Lake.