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Aug 17
TSMC overseas fabs see profit flip in 1H26, Arizona surges 663% YoY

Since 2020, when TSMC began its overseas manufacturing buildout, the company has tracked financial results at its foreign subsidiaries across the first half of 2025, full-year 2025, and the first half of 2026. The Arizona fab, long seen as difficult to make profitable, has expanded sharply, while Japan's JASM has turned from loss to profit, China operations have remained stable, and Germany's ESMC is still in the red as it remains under construction.

China AIoT chip designer Rockchip posted record first-half 2026 results, with revenue rising 40.6% year on year to CNY2.88 billion (US$427 million) and net profit surging 61.73% to CNY859 million, supported by accelerating edge AI adoption.

VeriSilicon posted record first-half 2026 revenue of CNY1.86 billion (US$276 million), up 91.37% year-on-year, as AI computing demand lifted custom silicon and mass-production services.

TSMC is expanding cooperation with packaging and testing affiliate Xintec as it develops next-generation power delivery and advanced packaging for AI chips, while market speculation points to a broader outsourcing role for the company in CoWoS back-end assembly.

Huawei's semiconductor investment arm is seeing an earlier optical-chip strategy line up with the AI infrastructure boom. Since 2019, Hubble Technology Investment Co. has backed a string of Chinese photonics and high-speed interconnect companies, including Vertilite, Yuanjie Semiconductor, North Ocean Photonics (NOP), and Newport Coast (Beijing) Technology, covering lasers, optical components, and transmission chips. The portfolio is now increasingly exposed to the same 800G, 1.6T, and 3.2T interconnect demand reshaping AI data centers.
Daxin Materials is expanding its semiconductor footprint, with semiconductor materials accounting for nearly 23% of revenue in the second quarter of 2026. The company expects the segment to reach 25% to 26% of full-year revenue, driven by 12 products already in mass production and a further 14 under customer validation.

Topco Scientific (TSC) said at its second-quarter 2026 earnings conference that rising upstream petrochemical costs are pushing up prices for semiconductor materials, including photoresists and thermal interface adhesives.

SK hynix's second-largest customer generated KRW17.19 trillion (approx. US$12.4 billion) in sales in the first half of 2026, nearly matching the KRW17.61 trillion contributed by its largest customer. Yonhap News Agency identified the largest customer as Nvidia.

Chinese AI chipmaker Biren expects first-half 2026 revenue to reach CNY1.15-1.3 billion (US$171-193 million), up about 1,852% to 2,107% from a year earlier, as demand for GPGPU computing expands across AI coding, long-horizon AI agents and generative AI workloads, according to Cninfo data cited in a report by the Hong Kong Economic Times (HKET).

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are preparing to invest in four memory fabs in southwestern South Korea, but alongside power infrastructure, the semiconductor industry's uninterrupted demand for water is emerging as another major burden on the region.

Nvidia has reached a deal with OpenAI to provide up to US$105 billion in credit guarantees for the AI startup's upcoming 8GW data center campus in Ohio. The support will help OpenAI to secure a lease from SB Energy, while Nvidia will be the facility's exclusive chip supplier.

The cloud AI data center boom is not close to bursting, according to chip supply-chain players. They say that analog ICs, including power semiconductors, will stay tight for years. They also expect price hikes to continue, with more than one round likely ahead.