Thailand is preparing to abandon the subsidy-led policy that made it Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing electric vehicle market, replacing it with a tax structure built to penalize carmakers that import rather than build. Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas said the excise tax on fully imported EVs could rise to around 30%, from 10% today — the first time the government has attached a number to the levy.
Advanced packaging remains one of the semiconductor industry’s hottest technology areas in 2026. In Taiwan, terms such as co-packaged optics (CPO), chiplets, and glass substrates are increasingly common as packaging moves deeper into system-level design.
MediaTek’s new Dimensity 9600 Pro puts agentic AI at the center of its flagship smartphone strategy, supporting on-device mixture-of-experts (MoE) models with up to 30 billion parameters. Vivo, among the first Chinese handset makers to adopt the platform, has followed with an expanded AI software stack spanning BlueLM, BlueLM Copilot, and a system-level BlueLM Harness.
Semiconductor packaging and testing materials distributor Niching Industrial hosted an investor conference on September 17. chief financial officer Chih Fang Chiu stated that full-year 2026 revenue is projected to grow by 20% to 30%. Beyond the consolidation benefits of acquiring Ming Chun Yuan Micro Precise Technology in July 2026, growth momentum remains robust across heat spreaders, solid-state drive (SSD) enclosures, and IC substrates, alongside ongoing expansion in thermally conductive adhesives. The company aims to double total revenue within three years.
Copper-clad laminate (CCL) manufacturer Ventec International Group has approved an expansion budget of NT$1.5 billion (approx. US$47.11 million) to lease and convert an idle factory in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China, as it moves to capture spillover demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-density interconnect (HDI) materials. The expansion budget is to be invested in three phases. Depending on future growth demand, the company will proceed with further capacity expansion investments in the second and third phases.
Growing memory requirements are increasing interest in Compute Express Link (CXL) as a way to add capacity beyond locally attached memory. But engineers from OpenAI and Intel see limits to using the interconnect as a substitute for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) where bandwidth remains critical.
Taiwan’s chipmakers are having their best year in a decade, and the headline number belongs to TSMC. The more interesting one does not.
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