semiconductor

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Micron, and other companies are increasing capital expenditures to expand production, driving the combined orders of the top five semiconductor engineering firms—HanTang, Axiom, FanXuan, Yankee, and ShengHui—to exceed 880 billion yuan, a record high. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company recently stated at a semiconductor exhibition that it is building up to 20 wafer fabs, with the overall capacity expansion scale increasing multiple times compared to the past, but it still cannot meet customer demand. The U.S. tariff policy has driven the demand for manufacturing plants in the United States. Axiom has the largest order amount of 440.73 billion yuan, and Chairman Yao ZuXiang pointed out that the cumulative amount of turnkey projects undertaken in Singapore over the past four years has reached 600 billion yuan, with expectations for new projects to follow. HanTang's order amount is approximately 193.937 billion yuan, setting a new record, benefiting from continued plant construction by major clients like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Micron.FanXuan's order amount reached a new high of 135.1 billion yuan, and Chairman Gao XinMing revealed that order visibility extends at least to 2028, with related projects for clients planned for 2029 and 2030. FanXuan has deployed materials, manpower, and local construction teams to support clients in Taiwan, Arizona in the United States, Japan, and Germany in synchronizing production expansion needs, and is investing in the development of technologies such as CoPoS. ShengHui's order amount exceeds 60 billion yuan, with Taiwan accounting for 68% and semiconductor orders accounting for 63%. In the first half of the year, the after-tax net profit was 2.944 billion yuan, with earnings per share of 23.73 yuan, setting a new high for the same period. Yankee's after-tax net profit in the first half of the year was 2.317 billion yuan, with earnings per share of 17.46 yuan, and the order amount is approximately 51.77 billion yuan, with order visibility reaching the end of 2027.

The supply chain reports that Amazon, a leading North American cloud service provider under AWS, has recently expanded the delivery of AI server cabinets, with strong shipping momentum from partners such as TSMC, World Advanced, Wistron, and Hon Hai. Amazon has recently revised its capital expenditure for this year, increasing the original estimate from $200 billion to $220 billion, primarily for AI infrastructure, including data centers, servers, and network equipment.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is optimistic that the demand for AI computing power will continue to exceed supply until 2027, and he has even seen strong demand for 2028. AWS's AI business and self-developed chip scale have grown to $25 billion, maintaining triple-digit percentage growth. Annapurna Labs' customized ASIC chips are mostly produced by TSMC using advanced 3-nanometer processes.World Advanced is an important partner for AWS's self-developed AI chips and is optimistic that its quarterly revenue and profits will reach new highs this season, with continued growth expected in the fourth quarter. The demand for 3-nanometer AI accelerators is better than previously assessed, and designs can be finalized before the end of the year. AWS's ASIC AI cabinets are assembled by Wistron, which also supplies switch trays, while Hon Hai is involved in CPU trays. Hon Hai's rotating CEO, Liu Young-way, stated that this year's ASIC project has made new progress, setting a target for ASIC server market share at over 40%.

South Korea plans to integrate five public power companies in October 2027 to accelerate investment and meet the energy demands brought about by the growth of the country's artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing industries.Seoul also plans to streamline public enterprises in the oil, gas, and port sectors.

According to a report by the Economic Daily, with the rising demand for AI and high-performance computing applications, TSMC is expanding its capacity for advanced processes below 3 nanometers at the request of its customers.Industry insiders are optimistic that TSMC's contribution from 3 nanometers in the second half of the year is expected to surpass that of 5 nanometers for the first time, estimating that the single-quarter output value in the third quarter will exceed 400 billion New Taiwan dollars, setting a new record, accounting for more than 30% of revenue, and positively impacting gross margin performance.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs of Taiwan has confirmed that Taiwanese companies will invest an additional 20 billion USD in the United States. Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua stated that in response to order demands, in addition to the main production bases in Taiwan, capacity will also be increased in the United States, primarily focusing on semiconductor manufacturers, supply chains, and AI server manufacturers.U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo previously stated that Taiwan would announce investments of 20 to 30 billion USD in the U.S. next week. The Ministry of Economic Affairs responded that this investment is the 20 billion USD announced by Wang Mei-hua during the opening of the SEMICON TAIWAN 2026 U.S. Pavilion on the 2nd. Wang Mei-hua pointed out that global orders for AI and semiconductors are booming, and the global president of SEMI has raised the forecast for global semiconductor revenue in 2030 from 1 trillion USD to 2 trillion USD.The Ministry of Economic Affairs' review shows that as of May this year, 20 semiconductor and AI server-related companies have announced investments of 35 billion USD in the United States, with an additional 20 billion USD added in the following months. Future cooperation will also extend to industries such as biotechnology and natural gas.

According to Bloomberg, UBS analysts expect that China's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities may struggle to make sufficient progress in the next decade to develop solutions that can truly replace ASML's cutting-edge EUV lithography technology. UBS analysts wrote in their report, "The stage they are currently at seems comparable to ASML's in 2004." Based on patent application activities, especially in the fields of light sources and laser subsystems, China's current technological maturity is roughly equivalent to ASML's level 15 years before it began mass production of EUV equipment.UBS also expects that China is likely to have the capability for mass production of immersion DUV lithography machines within the next two to five years. Although immersion DUV is not as advanced as EUV, it remains an indispensable tool in chip manufacturing. ASML's immersion DUV machines are priced at nearly $90 million, while EUV equipment costs over $200 million each. China is one of ASML's largest markets, but due to export restrictions, ASML is prohibited from selling EUV equipment to China. UBS pointed out that considering the yield and capacity gaps and regulatory restrictions, Chinese lithography equipment is unlikely to be applied overseas. An ASML spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. The report is based on UBS analysts' predictive views, and actual progress will depend on industry dynamics.

Today, South Korean semiconductor concept stocks are under pressure and have retreated, but trading in related asset markets remains active. According to data from the Gate platform, SK Hynix (000660) is currently priced at $1,175.12, with a 24-hour decline of 2.11%; Samsung Electronics (005930) is currently priced at $183.02, with a 24-hour decline of 1.94%.According to CoinGlass data, trading in the SKHYNIX and SAMSUNG contract markets is active, with the open interest of the two underlying contracts increasing by 4.03% and 7.30%, respectively. The trading volume of the contracts increased by 451.63% and 1069.65%, respectively. In Gate's related stock derivatives, the SKHX contract open interest reached $180 million, ranking second in the entire network, with a 24-hour trading volume of $180 million; the SAMSUNG contract open interest reached $8.14 million, ranking second in the entire network, with a 24-hour trading volume of $5.94 million.

Analysis of the AI semiconductor and infrastructure cycle indicates that the demand for AI infrastructure will continue to exceed that of the internet era, as user penetration and per capita token are multiplied and converted into tokens, significantly raising the ceiling. User penetration has surpassed 50%, with growth primarily coming from the still-early per capita token; the median monthly AI spending per employee in U.S. companies is about $12, which could long-term approach around 10% of white-collar salaries, approximately $1,000 per month, leaving nearly two orders of magnitude of space in between. Unlike the flat subscriptions and extremely low marginal hardware consumption of the internet, the high costs of inference make the marginal cost of a single access higher, requiring greater infrastructure intensity.After developers program, the next ARR growth will still mainly come from broad programming: non-programmers use programming infrastructure to complete non-programming tasks across industries, with programming becoming the default execution kernel for agents. Tasks related to broad programming account for about 60% to 70% of ARR. As of June 2026, Codex accounted for 64% of the total output tokens from Codex and ChatGPT among OpenAI's enterprise clients; since February, Codex has seen a much higher weekly growth in verticals such as law, sales recruitment, and marketing compared to engineering. In Anthropic's revenue, narrow development/software accounts for about 40%, while finance and insurance exceed 20%, with law, life sciences, retail, and others also having considerable shares.The demand-side token growth logic remains, with a high overlap between funders and beneficiaries.

According to Nikkei Asia, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung stated that the global shortage of memory chips is expected to last until the end of 2030, with a low risk of oversupply. He pointed out that in the AI era, memory chips are no longer just "commodities," and there are currently no signs of oversupply or industry downturn; demand from AI customers remains strong.SK Hynix is a major supplier to NVIDIA. The report stated that the company remains open to further expanding its investments in the U.S. after launching its first HBM chip packaging plant in Indiana.

SMIC (Hong Kong Stock 00981, A Share 688981) released its semi-annual report for 2026. The reporting period is from January 1, 2026, to June 30, 2026, and is unaudited. The company achieved operating revenue of 38.635 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 19.4%; total profit of 7.133 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 96.7%; net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company of 4.467 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 94.2%; net profit attributable to the parent company after deducting non-recurring gains and losses of 2.994 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 57.2%.During the same period, the net cash flow generated from operating activities was 20.760 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 252.0%; earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) was 24.511 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 40.7%. The gross profit margin was 23.2%, an increase of 1.3 percentage points compared to the same period last year; the net profit margin was 16.7%, an increase of 6.3 percentage points; basic and diluted earnings per share were both 0.56 RMB, a year-on-year increase of 93.1%. The board of directors approved the submission of this report on August 27, 2026, and the company has no profit distribution or capital reserve transfer plan.

According to eight people familiar with the discussions, despite warnings from tech companies that this move could affect the United States' dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, the Trump administration is still considering imposing a new round of comprehensive tariffs on semiconductors.

According to SemiWiki, WSTS data shows that the global semiconductor market sales reached $368 billion in the second quarter of 2026, a quarter-on-quarter increase of 35% and a year-on-year increase of 104%, setting a new historical high. The growth is mainly driven by AI demand, with significant quarter-on-quarter increases from memory manufacturers, SK Hynix and Sandisk at 51%, Kioxia at 76%; Nvidia's AI processor business grew 18% quarter-on-quarter, and Broadcom is expected to grow 33% quarter-on-quarter.Kioxia and Sandisk rose to eighth and ninth place globally, respectively, with both companies' revenues growing more than four times year-on-year. Excluding major AI suppliers, the other top 20 semiconductor manufacturers only saw a quarter-on-quarter increase of 9%, with guidance indicating a total quarter-on-quarter growth of about 6% for the third quarter of 2026. The growth expectations for memory manufacturers in the third quarter have clearly slowed down.Based on the latest forecasts, the semiconductor market growth rate for the entire year of 2026 is expected to reach or exceed 90%, with Semiconductor Intelligence predicting a growth of 101% and RCD Advisors predicting 112%; in the storage sector, WSTS expects a growth of 249%, while Gartner predicts 280%. Most institutions expect the growth rate to fall back to the mid-20% range in 2027.

According to Nikkei Asia, storage chip manufacturer Kioxia Holdings plans to build new production facilities at its factory in northern Japan, with project investments expected to exceed 1 trillion yen (approximately 6.27 billion USD).Kioxia currently ranks third in the global NAND flash memory market, behind Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. The company's move aims to follow its South Korean competitors in increasing production capacity to meet market demand.

According to Gate market data, after-hours trading on Wednesday for U.S. stocks saw Nvidia's new quarterly results continue to exceed market expectations, with a forecast of approximately 70% sales growth for the next fiscal year, driving AI concept stocks higher in after-hours trading.The storage sector collectively strengthened, with SK Hynix rising 4.48%, SanDisk up 3.71%, Micron Technology up 3.67%, Seagate Technology up 3.15%, and Western Digital up 3.11%. The Neocloud sector saw widespread gains, with Nebius up 6.27%, CoreWeave up 4.76%, Applied Digital up 3.26%, and both IREN and Core Scientific up 3.16%.Optical communication stocks rose across the board, with Applied Optoelectronics up 4.25%, Marvell Technology up 4.08%, Credo up 3.78%, Coherent up 3.35%, and Astera Labs up 3.34%. Semiconductor stocks also strengthened, with Arm up 4.18%, Marvell Technology and Nvidia both up 4.08%, Lam Research up 2.65%, and KLA up 2.42%.

On August 25, Bank of America data showed that actively managed long-term funds significantly reduced their holdings in global semiconductor stocks last month, selling approximately $44.4 billion, indicating that institutional funds are withdrawing from the most crowded AI trades. The flow of funds has shifted towards telecommunications, energy, materials, and grid modernization, reflecting a more noticeable redistribution within the AI theme.This set of data explains part of the recent market pressure. Ahead of NVIDIA's earnings report, the market still holds high expectations for AI demand, but semiconductor stocks have previously risen too much, and positions have become more concentrated. Once long-term interest rates rise, AI revenue expectations cool, or the return on capital expenditures for cloud vendors is questioned, the semiconductor sector will be the first to bear the pressure of position reduction. Bank of America also pointed out that the themes that funds sold the most in the past year include AI computing and quantum computing, indicating that funds have not completely left AI but are reducing exposure to highly crowded sectors.Bank of America expects that semiconductor stocks will continue to be influenced in the short term by NVIDIA's performance, cloud vendor guidance, and interest rate trends; in the medium term, funds may be more willing to allocate to sub-sectors such as electricity, equipment, networks, and storage that can share in AI infrastructure spending.

SemiAnalysis reported that the Nvidia Rubin Ultra will feature 192GB of HBM4 8-hi memory. This is not only a significant reduction from the initially previewed 1TB HBM but is even lower than the 288GB capacity of the standard Rubin.The reasons for the HBM configuration being cut down to about one-fifth of the original include: the cancellation of the four-die Rubin Ultra scheme, reducing the number of cubes to 8; the stacking height being lowered from 16-hi to 8-hi; and the use of HBM4 with 24Gb dies instead of HBM4E with 32Gb dies. An upgraded version with 8-hi HBM4E may be released later.

According to the Chosun Ilbo, in the context of the U.S. government increasing pressure on investment in South Korea, the U.S. has recently made demands to the South Korean government and companies to build storage semiconductor production facilities in the U.S. and ensure a stable supply of storage chips. In response to South Korea's promotion of a 800 trillion won semiconductor cluster plan, the U.S. has also informally expressed dissatisfaction, believing that South Korea is actively supporting domestic semiconductor investments while showing a negative attitude towards investing in the U.S. This is the first time the U.S. has mentioned the South Korean government's "super project" while pressuring for investment.Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Lee Chang-yang also discussed related matters during his recent visit to the U.S. for investment negotiations. The South Korean government believes that the U.S. semiconductor investment demands are independent of the previously agreed $350 billion investment arrangement with the U.S., and plans to announce its first investment project in the U.S. in September. Domestic semiconductor companies are concerned that if they formally accept the U.S. request to establish factories while promoting the Hunan cluster, it may create a dual burden. Additionally, it is reported that Foreign Minister Park Jin spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Rubio that evening to exchange views on investments in the U.S. and bilateral relations.

According to a report by ZDNet Korea, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix plan to continue investing in equipment for NAND flash production lines in China until next year to strengthen local production bases. Since the first half of this year, Samsung has been advancing V9 NAND conversion investments at the Xi'an X2 production line, which features an advanced process with approximately 280 layers stacked, and is expected to achieve a monthly production capacity of 40,000 to 50,000 wafers. To stabilize mass production, the company has confirmed a supplementary investment plan, focusing on additional etching process equipment, with related procurement orders expected to be clarified around the end of the year, and the supplementary investment planned to be executed starting in the second half of next year.SK Hynix has been advancing equipment investments related to NAND product upgrades at its Dalian Plant 2 since the third quarter of this year, with a discussed scale of approximately 30,000 wafers per month. Key manufacturing equipment will begin arriving next month, with plans to complete deployment by the first half of next year. The Dalian plant is an asset acquired after SK Hynix took over Intel's NAND division in the second half of 2020. In 2022, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for the expansion of Plant 2, but equipment investment was temporarily halted due to market conditions; this investment is now being restarted.Industry insiders point out that the above arrangements aim to gradually expand advanced NAND capacity within China to meet the rapid growth in demand for high-end storage in fields such as artificial intelligence servers.

Goldman Sachs' research report on August 23 pointed out that the forecast for wafer front-end equipment (WFE) for 2026 to 2028 has been raised to $150 billion, $218 billion, and $281 billion, which is an increase of 6%, 17%, and 35% respectively compared to previous forecasts. The adjusted year-on-year growth rates for the next three years are 36%, 45%, and 29%, while the previous expectations were 28%, 32%, and 12%.Goldman Sachs believes that DRAM and advanced process foundry are the main short-term drivers. In the DRAM sector, capital expenditure forecasts for Samsung and SK Hynix have been raised by 22% and 19% respectively, with HBM4 mass production driving demand for etching, deposition, and other equipment; in the foundry sector, TSMC's annual capital expenditure has been revised up by $8 billion, and the N2 process is entering the mass production ramp-up phase. NAND and logic/others (including Terafab) will take over in the medium term, and the approximately $16.8 billion initial phase equipment investment promised by SpaceX and Tesla has been included in the WFE forecast.Goldman Sachs is bullish on global semiconductor equipment stocks, with a focus on recommending Applied Materials, Lam Research, ASML, Tokyo Electron, ASMI, BESI, Lasertec, and Ebara.

According to the Economic Daily, semiconductor silicon wafers have seen a significant price increase for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, covering the full range of specifications including 6-inch, 8-inch, and 12-inch, with an increase starting at 10%. Industry insiders believe this is the first price adjustment in over three years, and major Taiwanese silicon wafer suppliers such as GlobalWafers, TSMC, and Hejian are expected to see improvements in revenue and profitability.GlobalWafers stated that recent demand in some end markets has gradually improved, inventory adjustments in the supply chain are healthier than in the past, and market signals are more positive than last year, but prices still depend on the product, specifications, and customer situations. TSMC mentioned that under cost pressures and demand support, they have begun communicating price adjustments with customers, and operations in the second half of the year are expected to outperform the first half. Hejian indicated that they are actively negotiating price adjustments with customers and continuing to promote advanced packaging and related products.Industry analysis suggests that this round of price increases mainly reflects the rebound in chip demand driven by AI, with increased usage in advanced and mature processes, allowing the upstream silicon wafer industry to gradually feel the recovery. Currently, the negotiation progress varies among factories and customers, with some 12-inch polished wafers already subject to new quotes with double-digit percentage increases, and discussions for 8-inch and 6-inch products are also moving in a similar upward direction.