Lim Eui-cheol, Vice President of SK hynix in charge of Solution AT, recently delivered a presentation at the "AI Infra Summit" held in the United States. He stated that as AI workloads become increasingly diverse, the existing GPU-HBM architecture alone is no longer sufficient to meet new demands. SK hynix is preparing new solutions combining software and hardware, such as PIM (Processing-in-Memory), HBF(High Bandwidth Flash), and SALT-KV (Semantic-Aware Lifecycle Tiering for KV Cache), to address the needs of these evolving workloads.

At Huawei Connect 2026, Huawei Rotating Chairman Wang Tao announced that the R&D progress of the Ascend 960 chip has exceeded expectations, with its overall performance doubling and its release schedule moved up.

According to media reports, Micron expects to assemble and test tens of millions of chips in 2026 at its first semiconductor assembly and test plant in India (the Sanand plant), and to expand capacity to hundreds of millions of units in 2027. Micron CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, said that the plant's current output capacity already exceeds the Memory required by India's laptop market. Finished DRAM and NAND products were now leaving Micron's facility in Sanand, Gujarat, for customers around the world with the "Made in India" label.

According to media reports, Nebius will raise prices for some of its on-demand computing resources starting October 1, marking the company's second round of price increases since May.

According to Korean media reports, Samsung plans to break away from its previous model of relying entirely on its in-house foundry division for Base Die production. Instead, it is adopting a “dual-track” strategy that also leverages TSMC’s process technology to manufacture Base Dies.

According to Korean media reports citing industry sources, Samsung has decided to outsource the increased production of DDR5 modules and SSDs for PCs, servers, and laptops entirely to Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) partners, rather than expanding its in-house capacity. This move aims to concentrate limited internal resources on high value-added Memory products like HBM.

According to media reports, Intel CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, expects the Memory supply shortage to become more severe next year due to growing AI demand. He noted that some Memory prices have already climbed five to seven times and many corporations are slow to expand their businesses because they can't secure enough Memory. He explained that as demand for high bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI surges, pressure is growing on the supply of commodity DRAM as well. In addition, Lip-Bu Tan stressed the importance of advanced packaging technology, emphasizing that CPU, AI accelerators, HBM, and I/O chips should be connected within a single package to shorten data travel distance and improve processing speed and power efficiency. Intel is targeting the AI Semiconductor market with its own advanced packaging technology, EMIB.

Micron Technology has announced the successful demonstration of the world's first 512GB DDR5 module on multiple server platforms. Leading semiconductor enablers, AMD and Intel, are both actively validating the module, which will deliver speeds up to 9,200 MT/s. Micron expects 512GB RDIMMs to be in volume production sometime in the second half of 2027 aligned to customer needs.

Citing mobile communications industry sources, South Korean media reported that a certain mobile carrier has notified retailers that the retail prices of all Galaxy S26 series models will be raised uniformly by 149,600 Korean won starting October 1. Industry insiders believe that Samsung Electronics may find it difficult to maintain its existing pricing structure due to recent rise in mobile application processor unit price, the burden of Memory semiconductor cost brought by high-performance on-device AI feature, and the continued impact of high exchange rates. Samsung Electronics is said to be cautious about officially confirming the retail prices of the Galaxy S26 series.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model has recently officially released. It is the smallest model in DeepSeek's new model architecture series and features native multimodal visual understanding capabilities. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is a 552B-parameter MoE model and significantly reduces the size of the KV Cache. Compared with the previous generation model, demand for HBM has been reduced to 1/4, and demand for SSDs has been reduced to 1/8. In Agent usage scenarios, cache hit costs often account for a relatively high proportion, and the compression of the KV Cache substantially lowers the usage cost of Agent-type tasks.

MediaTek announced that its consolidated revenue for August 2026 reached NT$64.183 billion, up 32.41% month-on-month and 44.08% year-on-year, setting a new historical monthly high; cumulative consolidated revenue for January to August this year reached NT$413.991 billion, up 5.76% year-on-year. MediaTek's combined revenue for July and August has already reached NT$112.658 billion, and September would need only about NT$39.5 billion to exceed the lower end of its third-quarter guidance, making it highly likely that the company will outperform its targets for the quarter.

In contrast, regarding DDR chips, since currently only a few Memory original manufacturers supply a small amount of high-grade DDR5 resources to core strategic customers, the scarcity of supply gives Memory original manufacturers strong pricing power. Moreover, spot market prices for DDR5 chips of the same capacity and grade remain excessively high, so Memory manufacturers still choose to continuously procure resources from Memory original manufacturers to replenish their inventory. Meanwhile, prices of some Memory original manufacturers' sub-grade DDR5 chips are still on the rise. This week, prices for DDR5 16Gb and 24Gb Major, as well as DDR5 16Gb eTT, have risen to US$44.00, US$55.00, and US$24.80, respectively.

Phison Electronics' consolidated revenue for August was NT$28.276 billion (New Taiwan dollars, same below), up 4% month-on-month and 377% year-on-year, setting a new historical monthly high. Cumulative revenue for January to August reached NT$164.293 billion, up 279% year-on-year, also setting a new record for the same period in history. CEO Pua Khein-Seng said that enterprises adopting AI has become an irreversible trend, with demand for key components such as CPUs, GPUs, DRAM, and SSDs remaining strong, while supply continues to be tight. Specifically, Phison's total controller chip shipments in August increased by 10% compared with July, among which PCIe SSD controller chip shipments grew by 77% month-on-month, as demand for AI servers, enterprise-grade storage, and high-speed PCIe SSDs continued to expand.

According to foreign media reports, Kioxia CEO Hiroo Ota recently responded to market rumors, explicitly ruling out the possibility of deepening cooperation with SK Hynix. He stated that such a move would face antitrust scrutiny hurdles and would be difficult to coordinate with the manufacturing facilities jointly owned by Kioxia and SanDisk.

According to Korean media citing industry sources, Apple has recently signed a long-term agreement (LTA) for NAND flash Memory. While specific details of the agreement, such as the counterparty, volume, and pricing terms, have not yet been disclosed, market speculation points to Kioxia, Apple's major NAND flash supplier, as the likely partner. Some observers speculate that the contract is a three- to five-year long-term agreement with no price ceiling. However, the contract duration and detailed pricing terms have yet to be officially confirmed.