Memory maker Winbond Electronics has recently continued to expand capital expenditures by increasing capacity for 16nm and DDR4 DRAM. As inventories of legacy DDR3 products decrease, DDR4 will officially become Winbond’s main product in the first half of 2026. The company’s new 8Gb DDR4 products manufactured on its in-house 16nm process have recently passed customer qualification smoothly and are expected to enter mass production and shipment in the first to second quarters of 2026.

Taiwan’s economy saw outstanding growth in 2025, emerging as an outlier not just in Asia but also worldwide. In its recently released forecast for 2026, the Institute of Economics at Academia Sinica sharply revised its estimate for GDP growth to 7.41% for 2025, up 4.48pp from its previous estimate of 2.93%. Although growth in 2026 is likely to slow down due to the high baseline in 2025, AI-related industries will continue to prop up external demand and investments in Taiwan.

The US government has decided not to impose additional semiconductor tariffs on China for the next 18 months, despite concluding that Beijing’s state-led chip industry policies involve unfair subsidies and market distortion. DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin stressed in a recent podcast that this should not be misinterpreted as a softening stance toward China.