The chairman of Wiwynn said that AI hardware design and deployment are driven by growing demands for power, cooling, and interconnect speed, not just compute chips. This is changing the entire server supply chain.
ByteDance plans to spend about 100 billion yuan ($14.9 billion) annually on chip substrates, according to Digitimes. A shortage of advanced packaging substrates is limiting China's AI chip output.
At AI Infra Summit 2026, Seagate demonstrated 44TB HAMR drives and physical AI solutions, while Western Digital outlined its hard drive roadmap.
Intel is in talks with Taiwan's AUO on advanced packaging using Micro LED glass substrates for co-packaged optics and high-density computing, per Digitimes. Display makers aim to convert large-format glass processing expertise into semiconductor packaging capabilities.
South Korea's DB HiTek is strengthening its pricing position amid a shortage of 8-inch wafers, high fab utilization and rising demand for power management chips. Conditions in mature process nodes are improving.
Anderon LLC, part of IBM, has finalized a $1 billion grant under the CHIPS and Science Act to expand quantum wafer manufacturing in Albany, New York.
Dongfeng Motor will deploy Xiaodong humanoid robots in factories in October for sorting and quality control, and will begin small-batch trial production by the end of 2026. By the end of 2027 the robots are expected to match human capabilities. The Yuanzai robot dog will enter commercial use earlier, starting with consultations in car dealerships.
Brainchip has launched its AKD1500 neuromorphic accelerators: an M.2 B+M Key card at $129, a BrainBoard 1500 module at $99, and a PCIe card at $149. The chip delivers up to 800 GOPS while consuming under 300 mW and supports on-device learning without the cloud.
HWiNFO 8.53 beta build 6075 adds support for Intel Nova Lake qualification sample (QS) CPUs and fixes SA VID reporting. QS is a stage close to retail chips, indicating Nova Lake's launch is nearing; previous reports suggest a release in early 2027.
DIGITIMES Intelligence notes that as AI accelerators and server CPUs grow more powerful, chips become more complex not only in core count and I/O channels but also in integration complexity. As a result, the substrate shortage is shifting from raw materials to production equipment.
Hardware Unboxed and Toasty Bros tested an OEM Radeon RX 9050 with 4 GB of memory. Across 18 games at 1080p Low it averaged 78 FPS versus 107 FPS for the 8 GB model, a gap of about 37%. AMD sells the 4 GB version only in partner prebuilt PCs and has no retail plans.
Agility Robotics has shown Digit 5, a humanoid robot designed to work alongside people. It features an Nvidia Thor IGX chip and sensors that track human presence in real time, causing the robot to step back, stop, or crouch. It lifts up to 50 pounds (about 23 kg), runs 90 minutes per charge, and fully charges in 9 minutes.
AMD introduced a tetrahedral shell method for ray tracing: dense geometry remains static while a simple shell is animated. In a demo with 500 million animated triangles, the scene runs above 60 FPS at 1080p on Radeon RX 9070 XT, BVH memory drops about 47 times, and update time is over 90 times faster.
Researchers at Delft University of Technology equipped a sub-100-gram drone with tactile whiskers using three miniature pressure sensors at each base. The system detects obstacles and maps by touch, with the entire processing pipeline using 34 KB of memory.
Northrop Grumman and SandboxAQ conducted flight tests of AQNav quantum navigation on the Lumberjack drone. The system uses an optically pumped magnetometer to measure variations in Earth's magnetic field and determine position without GPS, operating at room temperature.
AMD launched two 6-core Ryzen 5 processors: the Zen 3-based 5500F at $118 and the Zen 4-based 7500 at $209 on Amazon US. Both prices are $20 above MSRP, which is typical at launch.
In Q2 2026, Ethernet switch revenue rose 43.4% year over year to $18.91 billion, while router revenue grew 22.8% to $4.51 billion. Sales of 800 Gbps switches surged 6.1 times to $5.07 billion, driven by AI clusters in data centers.
In the iPhone 18 Pro, the A20 Pro chip with two 16-core Neural Engines runs the 27B Bonsai model twice as fast as the iPhone 17 Pro on A19 Pro. Memory is 12 GB LPDDR5X with 115.2 GB/s bandwidth, but 2-bit models like Bonsai 2 do not fit.
Faraday Future and Jia Yueting announced nine robot configurations with an EAI brain, including the Futurist and Master humanoids and the wheeled-legged Aegis. Prices range from $9,990 for the Master Mini to $137,900 for the industrial Hyper, while the flagship Futurist Ultra on Nvidia Jetson Thor costs $129,900.
Spirit AI said dozens of its Moz1 wheeled humanoid robots are already working on production lines at CATL and JD.com. Co-founder Gao Yang expects a GPT-3 moment for robot brains by mid-2027.
At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Digital China's KunTai brand launched a server lineup based on Kunpeng 950 and Ascend 950DT: balanced R722 K3, standard A989 I5, air-cooled supernode A989 I5, and liquid-cooled PoD2000 A5. PoD2000 A5 supports a cluster of 1024 cards, 256 TB unified memory, and MFU around 45%.
Japan's GMO Internet Group unveiled the "Humanoid Ambulance," the country's first van for repair and maintenance of humanoid robots. An engineer will be on board to fix the bot on-site or take it to service, providing a replacement. Service launch is this month.
UBTECH's Liuzhou factory produces one Walker S2 humanoid robot every 10 minutes using Siemens digital twins. Meanwhile, the FCC banned imports of new Chinese humanoid robots over cybersecurity risks and fears of remote takeover of devices in US homes and factories.
A Walmart customer paid nearly $500 for a Ryzen 7 9800X3D but found a fake processor in the sealed box: the PC would not boot, and the serial number did not match the packaging. The store refused a return, and the buyer is disputing the purchase through the bank.
Chinese DRAM maker CXMT announced mass production of its fifth technology platform with 11.95 nm key element pitch and introduced two 24 Gbit LPDDR5X products. The platform yields at least 50% more good dies per wafer than the fourth generation.
China Mobile released Open-RAIL (Apache-2.0) on GitHub, a server-client software that connects vision-language-action and world-action models to real robots. The middleware reduces joint acceleration variance from 10 rad/s² to 0.1 rad/s², bridging a 30–50x control frequency gap without retraining the model.
Taiwanese suppliers of chip production equipment and components are growing almost twice as fast as chipmakers themselves. The main growth driver is the testing stage for AI chips.
Tektronix introduced the 7 Series DPO oscilloscopes; the flagship DPO718AX is the first 8-channel instrument with up to 25 GHz bandwidth per channel and 125 GS/s sampling. Inside is a 12-core AMD EPYC Embedded 3351, 96 GB RAM, Nvidia T1000 GPU, and a 15.6-inch touchscreen. Price starts at $178,000 for the 4-channel version and $308,000 for the 8-channel version.
South Korean startup MilliTrack introduced the AMR+ system, which supplements autonomous mobile robot navigation with millimeter radio waves where cameras and LiDAR fail. Claimed accuracy is 3 cm at distances up to 30 m with latency under 100 ms; launch is planned for March 2027.
AMD released the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, an eight-core Zen 4 processor with 96 MB 3D V-Cache for $329. Frequencies are reduced to 4.0/4.5 GHz versus 4.2/5.0 GHz on the 7800X3D, TDP 120 W, AM5 socket, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support.
