TSMC plans another $100B US investment - geopolitical insurance at semiconductor scale
TSMC is accepting a 30-50% cost premium on US manufacturing. That's not a business decision—it's a geopolitical hedge at foundry scale.
25 min ago 6 6
Japan Inc. raises full-year profit forecast 14% - and the driver is AI chips, not domestic demand
Japanese companies are collectively upgrading earnings guidance as global AI capital expenditure flows through the upstream supply chain—semiconductors, manufacturing equipment, and materials.
yesterday 9 9
Discovered Materials is hunting cooler chips with AI—because the heat wall is now as real as the compute wall.
A startup is using AI to explore the space of possible semiconductor and cooling materials. At 1,000W per chip, thermal management is becoming the limiting factor for datacenter density.
Aug 10, 2026 at 16:30 10 11
SK Hynix weighs bringing in an investor for its $3B China chip site - memory geopolitics just got more complex
SK Hynix is considering bringing in an outside investor for its $3 billion China DRAM facility. The move signals a new phase in the memory chip geopolitical chess game—neither a full exit nor full commitment.
Aug 8, 2026 at 09:57 14 16
Nanya bets $10.7B on DRAM capacity - the memory capex race reaches Taiwan
Taiwan's Nanya Technology plans a $10.7 billion fab investment, adding another major player to a global DRAM expansion wave driven entirely by AI memory demand.
Aug 7, 2026 at 10:55 13 13
Apple's talks with China's CXMT memory chipmaker hit a price wall
Apple's reported negotiations with CXMT - China's state-backed DRAM manufacturer - have stalled on pricing. Supply diversification from Samsung and Micron is proving more politically and commercially complex than expected.
Aug 6, 2026 at 11:00 11 11
DeepX raises $30M: South Korea produces its own AI inference chip for the edge
South Korean startup DeepX raises $30M for its AI chip dedicated to edge inference. Following datacenter GPUs, Korea bets on a specialized chip for on-device deployments—free from Nvidia dependency.
Aug 4, 2026 at 12:01 10 11
Conventional DRAM and NAND hit record highs in July: the memory squeeze widens
Korean industry data show conventional (non-HBM) memory prices at all-time highs in July—the AI supercycle now spills into the general-purpose stack.
Aug 3, 2026 at 13:20 11 13
CXMT closes in on LPDDR6 mass production at 12,800 Mbps - the Chinese memory step-up
ChangXin Memory Technologies nears mass production of 12,800 Mbps LPDDR6 mobile DRAM—a real technological leap for China's memory industry, months after its IPO surge.
Aug 1, 2026 at 09:40 15 13
Samsung pushes HBM5 base die to 2nm targeting +50% speed - the memory war moves to logic-class nodes
Samsung plans to build the base die of HBM5 using its 2nm process, aiming for a 50% speed improvement. Memory is no longer just about increasing capacity; it's also about leveraging advanced logic-node economics.
Jul 27, 2026 at 10:16 17 12
Nvidia's $1.5B Amkor deal: the US packaging leg finally gets its capex
Nvidia signs $1.5B with Amkor for advanced packaging in the United States. The compute AI bottleneck rises one notch towards the sovereignty of the back-end.
Jul 26, 2026 at 18:40 8 9
Korea-US $950B: the AI supercycle signs its most political contract yet
Three days of meetings in Seoul and San Francisco result in a Korea-US package valued by ETNews at ~$950B. The `korea-ai-supercycle` thread moves from signal to lock.
Jul 26, 2026 at 18:40 14 11