Although Taiwanese firms have largely missed the core AI chip development battlefield, a few with critical technological barriers have broken through—most notably Aspeed and ASMedia. These two companies boast remarkable profitability and capital market performance that even outpace MediaTek, Taiwan’s largest IC design firm. Significantly, their founding management teams mostly originated from the once-dominant PC chipset giants Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and VIA Technologies.

As artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates the buildout of data centers, the race to supply their enormous energy demands is drawing new alliances between China’s technology and industrial giants.

Meta Platforms has unveiled Muse Spark, the first AI model from its newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, marking a major step in its efforts to regain momentum in an AI race dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, according to Reuters. Internally code-named Avocado, the model is designed to be small, fast, and efficient yet capable of handling complex tasks in science, math, and health.