Trump and Xi Jinping are set for a rare high-profile meeting at the White House, with Trump personally greeting Xi at Joint Base Andrews on September 23. Ahead of the summit, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and trade representative Jamieson Greer are meeting China's vice premier He Lifeng to hash out an agenda covering tariffs, rare earth minerals, technology competition, and Taiwan. The immediate pressure point is the Busan trade truce, which paused tariff hikes and port fees but expires November 10.
wired.com
· 2026-09-21
PieceMakers, a DRAM designer majority-owned by Nanya Technology, began trading on Taiwan's Emerging Stock Board at a NT$740 reference price and closed its first session up 23.6% at NT$915, valuing the company near $1.4 billion. Rather than competing in HBM, the firm is pursuing custom memory designs that bond DRAM directly to processors via hybrid bonding, positioning the technology between SRAM-only chips like Nvidia's Groq LPU and traditional HBM for AI inference workloads.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-16
Micron unveiled a one-time NT$1 million (~$31,650) cash bonus for Taiwan staff as part of a larger rewards package that guarantees at least NT$1.7 million per worker, calling it the largest such payout in company history. Unions representing roughly 10,000 of Micron's 15,000 Taiwan employees rejected the offer, dismissing it as a distraction and instead demanding a 15% profit-sharing arrangement tied to the company's AI-driven earnings surge.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-14
Micron offered Taiwan employees a one-time cash bonus of up to NT$1 million, plus guaranteed minimum compensation for direct labor staff equivalent to 35-68 months of basic salary, following a record-profit year driven by AI demand. The union at its Taoyuan plant rejected the deal within hours, saying it ignores their core demand: a permanent bonus formula tying 15% of operating profit to quarterly worker payouts instead of one-off checks.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-14
Anthropic's September 2026 threat report describes Chinese-based actors using its Claude models across at least five programs, including two tied to military applications. One actor drafted fire-control specifications for an anti-torpedo system and benchmarked it against U.S. Navy systems, while another built roughly 16 software modules for suppressing enemy air defenses, with a default scenario targeting 12 sites in Taiwan such as Patriot batteries and air bases. Metadata reviewed by Anthropic suggested links to Chinese research institutions, including the PLA Academy of Military Sciences.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-13
Taiwan's Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau has pursued 166 investigations into companies illegally operated by Chinese owners disguised through shell firms or local nominees, resulting in at least 36 convictions since 2020. These businesses skirted Taiwan's Cross-Strait Act, which requires Chinese entities to obtain government permits before operating on the island, permits that are increasingly hard to secure amid rising cross-strait tensions.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-05
TSMC executive Cliff Hou revealed that the chipmaker's projected need for semiconductor manufacturing tools rose from a baseline estimate late last year to 1.5 times that figure by Q1 and 1.9 times by July, driven by new fabs in Taiwan and the U.S. plus upgrades to existing plants. Despite the near-doubling in equipment requirements, TSMC's 2026 capital expenditure guidance has only risen from an initial $52-56 billion range toward roughly $64 billion, a far smaller percentage increase.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-03
Taoyuan prosecutors raided Unimicron Technology's headquarters and a plant, questioning 14 staff over allegations the company relabeled China-manufactured circuit boards as Taiwan-origin products. Several executives were released on bail ranging from NT$300,000 to NT$15 million, and the investigation into possible forgery and false origin-marking continues.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-31
A Taiwanese man remotely accessed his robot vacuum's camera to catch his wife with another man, then used the footage to win roughly $16,000 in a civil suit over infringement of spousal rights. His wife countersued for illegal filming without consent, and a court sentenced him to five months in prison and fined him about 30% of his award.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-31
Nvidia shares jumped over 7% in premarket trading after strong revenue guidance calmed investor worries about slowing AI spending. CFO Colette Kress projected 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, while CEO Jensen Huang said actual demand exceeds that figure but supply constraints are limiting sales. The rally spread across the chip sector, lifting Micron, Marvell, Arm, Intel, AMD and cloud infrastructure firms Nebius and CoreWeave.
cnbc.com
· 2026-08-27
Taiwanese prosecutors have charged nine individuals in connection with an alleged scheme to illegally smuggle AI servers, according to reporting on the case. The same roundup notes the U.S. has sanctioned suspected Iranian hackers on what officials called 'economic D-Day,' and Alabama has issued a subpoena to OpenAI over a cyberattack tied to its systems.
wsj.com
· 2026-08-25
King Slide Works, a company that manufactures furniture components such as drawer slides, has propelled its founder to become Taiwan's richest person amid the AI boom. Unlike chipmakers directly tied to AI infrastructure, King Slide's rise stems from its role supplying precision slide-rail systems used in data-center server racks, an unexpected byproduct of surging AI hardware demand.
wsj.com
· 2026-08-25
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