Chip Industry Week in Review

Geopolitics

Taiwan and the U.S. signed a trade agreement this week, with TSMC and other Taiwanese companies collectively pledging to directly invest at least $250B in investments in advanced semiconductor, energy and AI production and capacity in the U.S.  The agreement also included Taiwan providing another $250B in credit guarantees for additional IC supply chain expansions in the U.S., capped reciprocal tariff rates at no more than 15%, and potential exemptions from Section 232 duties for investments in the U.S. The goal is to bring 40% of Taiwan’s chip supply chain and production to the U.S., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC.

Under a national security proclamation aimed at reducing reliance on foreign supplies, the U.S. announced a 25% tariff on imports of select advanced computing and AI chips, including Nvidia’s H200 and AMD’s MI325X. The goal is to ramp up volumes of chips made in the U.S., rather than supplementing supplies with chips made elsewhere. The duty excludes chips imported for U.S. data centers, startups, consumer and industrial applications, and public sector use, with further exemptions possible.

Fabs

Micron is planning to buy PSMC’s P5 fabrication site in Tongluo, Taiwan for $1.8B. The 300,000 sf., 300mm fab cleanroom aims to increase Micron’s DRAM output starting mid next year.

SK hynix announced construction of a new $12.9B HBM packaging fab (P&T7) in Cheongju, South Korea, with completion scheduled for the end of next year. The company also accelerated plans to open a new chip fab in Yongin, South Korea, by moving the first phase three months earlier to February 2027. It also will begin wafer processing at its M15X plant next month to produce HBM for AI systems, responding to surging global memory demand, reports Reuters.

Acquisitions

Siemens EDA acquired ASTER Technologies, which specialized in PCB assembly test verification and engineering software, enabling advanced shift-left design for test functionality.

Synopsys entered a definitive agreement with GlobalFoundries to sell its ARC-V (RISC-V) neural network processor IP and related dev tools. Synopsys will focus on its interface and foundation IP, and AI-driven opportunities from cloud to edge. GF will integrate ARC into its MIPS business.

Reports

Worldwide semiconductor revenue grew 21% in 2025 to $793B, driven by sustained demand for AI accelerators and data center infrastructure, according to Gartner. Memory remained the fastest-growing segment, while logic also saw double-digit gains as advanced-node capacity continued to ramp.

Global semiconductor revenues are forecast to exceed $1 trillion in 2026 — which if correct shaves four years off initial estimates — driven by surging memory and logic IC demand tied to AI infrastructure and strong 2025 results, according to Omdia.

EDA and IP revenue grew 8.8% in Q3 2025 to $5.566 billion, up from $5.115 billion in the same period in 2024. The big surprise was the Pacific Rim, where South Korea and Taiwan were closing in on China.

Technologies

Cadence released 40-bit channel LPDDR5X memory IP for data center and enterprise applications, supporting up to 9600Mbps data rates, with high reliability from Microsoft’s redundant array of independent double data rate (RAIDDR) error correction code (ECC) coding schema, offering protection equivalent to the symbol-based ECC of DDR5 RDIMM.

Wolfspeed demonstrated a single-crystal 300mm silicon carbide wafer, marking a technical milestone for scaling SiC substrates beyond the industry’s current 200 mm standard. The advance is expected to improve wafer uniformity, throughput, and cost efficiency for power and RF devices used in EV, energy, and industrial applications, according to the company.

Financial releases: Besi and TSMC (fourth quarter).

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Global

Asia

• Baya Systems opened its expanded Bengaluru, India engineering hub dedicated to AI, automotive, and HPC innovation.
• Vietnam broke ground on the country’s first wafer fab, expected to be operational late next year.
• Indonesia announced funding of $120M to $250M (~IDR 4.2T) to develop its semiconductor ecosystem, with a potential total investment of up to $1B. The government also allocated $125M for a separate collaboration with Arm aimed at catching up with other Southeast Asian nations.
• South Korea plans to allocate ~$159M to support research in semiconductors, displays, and batteries across 27 projects.
• India’s NIELIT and Infineon are teaming up on semiconductor training and workforce development in India.

Europe

• Ireland is funding a €100M expansion of Tyndall National Institute to advance the country’s semiconductor innovation and advanced manufacturing.
• The EIB approved €90M in financing for METLEN Energy & Metals’ project to modernize bauxite mining operations and build Europe’s first EIB-backed gallium production facility in Central Greece, supporting critical raw materials supply for advanced manufacturing.

Americas

• KoMiCo opened a new semiconductor equipment cleaning and coating facility in Mesa, Arizona.
• Tekscend Photomask was awarded a $15.2M Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant to expand photomask production capacity at its Round Rock, TX facility, supporting a more than $223 million capital investment by Tekscend.
• New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a ratepayer protection plan that requires data centers to pay their fair share of costs.
• Microsoft announced a Community-First AI Infrastructure plan, saying it will pay for electricity and replenish water used in areas where it has data centers.

Australia

• Australia’s government unveiled a A$1.2 billion Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve to secure domestically produced minerals such as gallium, antimony, and rare earths, a move aimed at strengthening supply chains for clean energy, defense, and advanced manufacturing.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published two newsletters, Low Power–High Performance and Test, Measurement & Analytics, including:

2 Special Reports:

• Liquid Cooling Gains Traction In Data Centers
• Wafer Probe Struggles To Adapt To Multi-Die Assemblies.

4 Top Stories:

• How And Why To Optimize NPUs
• Will 2026 Be Dominated By AI?
• Secure Data Sharing Becoming Critical For Chip Manufacturing
• HBM4 Sticks With Microbumps, Postponing Hybrid Bonding

Plus:

• Opinion: Data Centers Need High Reliability Semiconductors
• News: EDA and IP Revenue Up 8.8%
• Video: Challenges In Moving Data In Chips

Markets, Money, Reports

M&A/IPO

• Arteris closed its previously announced acquisition of Cycuity.
• SEALSQ signed an MoU for a potential strategic investment and acquisition of Quobly.
• Honeywell plans to carve out Quantinnum, which is preparing to file an IPO.

Funding

• Quadric announced an oversubscribed $30M Series C funding round, for a total of $72M, to be used for its general-purpose NPU IP across edge LLM, automotive, and enterprise vision.
• China-based SpacemiT raised over $86M Series B for mass production of server-class RISC-V processors, per SCMP.
• Equal1 raised $60M to accelerate the manufacturing of quantum processors on existing semiconductor fabs.

Deals

• Tata Consultancy Services and AMD inked a strategic collaboration focused on accelerating enterprise AI adoption across data center, cloud, and edge environments. The effort centers on jointly developing and deploying AI workloads on AMD platforms to move customers from pilot projects into production-scale implementations.
• OpenAI partnered with Cerebras to add 750MW of ultra low-latency AI compute to its platform.

Reports/Opinions

• Global 8-inch wafer capacity is set to decline about 2.4% in 2026 as TSMC and Samsung cut legacy capacity, reports TrendForce. AI-driven demand for power ICs is expected to support fab utilization and prompt foundries to prepare price increases of roughly 5% to 20%.
• Critical semiconductor trends to watch  (Yole)
• Data centers need $3T in investments through 2030, according to a Moody’s report analyzed by Bloomberg.
• MIT rounded up regional data center gripes, along with an explanation of why they are at the leading edge of technology.
• Global AI spending will total about $2.5T in 2026 (Gartner)
• Which countries are adopting AI the fastest (Economist)

Research

MIT researchers developed a method for cooling trapped ions using photonic chips that is an order of magnitude below the limit of standard laser cooling.

EeroQ solved the wire problem in quantum computing by showing that complex, large-scale electron motion can be orchestrated using only a few dozen wires. A wiring and control architecture enables EeroQ’s qubits to be transported over long distances on a chip without loss or error.

More recently published research:

• Process and materials compatibility considerations for introducing novel EUV resists in a fab (KU Leuven, imec)
• Leveraging Qubit Loss Detection in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Algorithms (MIT, Harvard, QuEra)
• Challenges and Research Directions for LLM Inference Hardware (Google)

New Technologies

Keysight Technologies released a machine learning toolkit to accelerate model parameter extraction for advanced nodes, RF, and power applications, as well as to expedite PDK development.

Siemens unveiled several AI-based technologies at CES 2026, including digital twins composer software and nine industrial copilots.

The Airbus UpNext SpaceRAN demonstrator will test the capabilities of a 5G non-terrestrial network using both a ground and in-orbit demonstration.

RISC-V specialist SiFive is adopting and integrating Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion for its high-performance data center-class solutions.

Automotive

Microchip’s subsidiary SST and UMC announced the immediate production availability of the 28nm SuperFlash Gen 4 automotive grade 1 platform.

Honda is diversifying its chip supply chain due to the Nexperia debacle.

The European Commission set out conditions that China-based battery EV makers can replace EU tariffs with commitments to sell at minimum prices.

Tesla’s full self-driving software will only be available as a monthly subscription of $99 per month after February 14.

The BMW M model, set to launch in 2027, features a fully electric drivetrain and 800V technology.

According to a McKinsey report, India’s EV sales are projected to grow by roughly 35% CAGR.

Quadric announced that Japan’s TIER IV licensed its Chimera AI processor SDK to optimize its next-gen open-source software for autonomous driving.

Security

CISPA publicly disclosed StackWarp this week, a security vulnerability that “exploits a synchronization bug present in all AMD Zen 1–5 processors.” AMD already released microcode patches to address this. According to the paper, the findings were embargoed until 1/15/2026.

Cybersecurity startup Aikido raised a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation.

CSIS’ Sezaneh Seymour breaks down how the court-authorized takedown of digital criminal infrastructure is underused in the U.S.

Chinese authorities have reportedly banned domestic companies from using cybersecurity software from over a dozen firms in the U.S. and Israel, including VMware, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinent and more.

Research:

• A Performant Side-channel-Resistant RISC-V Core Securing Edge AI Inference (Northeastern)
• A Primer on Security of Quantum Computing Hardware (Penn State University)
• Cyber Threat Detection Enabled by Quantum Computing (Johns Hopkins)
• Instruction-Tuned Fine-tuning of Domain-Specific LLMs with RAG and Graph Integration for MITRE Evaluation (Grambling State University, Florida International University

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Trending Video

Using AI In Semiconductor Inspection: Finding anomalies and defects faster in complex chip and package topographies.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here.

• Turning Compliance Into Competitive Credibility: Exclusive Launch of New CMMC Readiness Research, Jan. 21
• Accelerating Iterative Design Cycles with Solido Additive Learning Technology, Jan. 21

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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