Japanese auto parts supplier Denso said on April 27 that it is considering all options, including withdrawing its acquisition proposal for chipmaker Rohm, after failing to secure the company's support.

Global outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) leader ASE Technology Holding (ASEH) held its 2025 ASE Supplier Award ceremony, inviting more than 100 suppliers of packaging and testing equipment, raw materials, components, and processing, along with its subsidiaries Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), and Universal Scientific Industrial (USI).

ASML has launched its 0.55 High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet (High-NA EUV) in an effort to extend Moore's Law. The market had originally expected TSMC to adopt it first, but the company has held back. TSMC Senior Vice President of Global Business Kevin Zhang stated at the North America Technology Symposium that there are currently no plans to introduce High-NA EUV before 2029, mainly because "it's too expensive!" This decision also reflects how TSMC is shifting competition focus from equipment to process integration and cost efficiency.

Below are the most-read DIGITIMES Asia stories from the week of April 20-27, 2026:

As the AI buildout accelerates and chipmakers race to secure advanced process capacity, TSMC finds itself in an increasingly commanding position.

As the global automotive industry moves toward deeper integration of electronic and electrical (E/E) architectures, a new axis of competition is emerging: digital sovereignty. Fueled by rising concerns over cybersecurity, control of the software-defined vehicle is rapidly becoming as consequential as mastery of engines once was.

MediaTek's application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) business is drawing market attention as volume production of Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) is expected to ramp from the second half of 2026. Views differ on how fast the segment will grow, though some estimates suggest ASIC revenue could overtake smartphone chips by 2027 to become the company's largest revenue source.

South Korea and Vietnam have expanded cooperation across technology, energy, and infrastructure, signing dozens of agreements during Korean President Lee Jae-Myung's visit to Hanoi, as both countries seek to reinforce supply chain resilience amid global volatility.

India is accelerating its semiconductor ambitions, from Micron Technology's Sanand ramp to new fabrication and advanced packaging projects, while expanding design partnerships. At the same time, regulatory pressure on Apple, weakening smartphone demand, and solar policy tensions highlight challenges alongside growing global supply-chain integration.

As global companies race to capture opportunities in AI optical communications and co-packaged optics (CPO), Taiwanese LED and optoelectronics firms are actively transforming and entering the field. Everlight Electronics, a leading LED packaging company, has also begun low-profile positioning, considering investments in related startups and leveraging its strengths in high-end optocouplers to play a key role in optical signal transmission and coupling.

Across both sides of the Pacific, robot startups and leading laboratories have reached a consensus over the past year that model architecture is no longer the sole focus. Data has become the core competitive resource. Regardless of how technical approaches evolve, most teams eventually encounter the same problem: the shortage of training data.

S-Tech Corp's shift toward titanium alloys and entry into the US market could reshape global supply for the aerospace and defense sectors, reducing reliance on nickel-based products and mitigating raw-material price risks while influencing inventory cycles and production utilization worldwide.

As AI infrastructure and industrial electricity use rise, Taiwan's shifting power landscape has far-reaching global implications for supply reliability, corporate competitiveness, and carbon-cost exposure. Companies worldwide with local operations or supply chains tied to Taiwanese manufacturing may face higher energy prices, tighter grid constraints, and increased demand for behind-the-meter energy storage and power-quality solutions.

While humanoid robots application remains a topic of debate, initial deployment is expected to be in structured environmental environments. However, there is large potential in the home and/or commercial market. According to DIGITIMES Research, home environments impose significantly higher requirements on humanoid robots, with dexterous hands being a critical development factor.

Global Wi-Fi router shipments are increasingly driven by telecom operators' upgrade cycles and tender deployments rather than consumer demand, with traditional seasonality continuing to weaken. Since 2025, the market has shown a pattern of weaker peak seasons and firmer off-seasons.

Driven by AI, demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is surging, causing a supply shortage in DRAM and prompting cloud service providers to pre-book capacity for the next two years. The rising need for larger HBM capacities is expected to grow exponentially, while 3D DRAM technology emerges as a solution to overcome current process scaling limits.

South Korea's three leading telecom operators—SK Telecom (SKT), KT, and LG U+—signaled a decisive shift beyond connectivity at the World IT Show (WIS) 2026, held April 22–24 in Seoul, unveiling AI-centric strategies spanning agents, applications, and infrastructure as they position themselves as full-stack AI platform providers.

At its first-quarter 2026 earnings call, Tesla set out a clear shift in strategy: moving the auto industry away from ownership toward a usage-based mobility model. By aligning software, hardware, and manufacturing capacity, the company is repositioning its vehicles not just as products, but as assets within a service-driven ecosystem.

Cerebras Systems filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on April 17, 2026, aiming to list on the Nasdaq. The company reversed its fortunes with US$510 million in revenue and a net profit of US$87.9 million in 2025, compared to US$290 million revenue and a net loss of US$484.8 million in 2024.