The rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which."
—Stephen Hawking
A small group of workers at Micron Technology’s Taoyuan plant in Taiwan staged a strike over bonuses and profit-sharing, with union chairman Jerry Lin vowing to continue pressing for the workers’ demands after negotiations failed to reach an agreement.
Micron has reached a labour-management agreement with a union at its Taichung operations in Taiwan, but a separate union’s planned October 22 strike over employee bonuses and profit-sharing remains unresolved.
The lab aims to advance quantum research and semiconductor capabilities. On the industry and market front, Samsung forecasts record-high Q3 2026 operating profit amid surging AI-driven memory-chip demand, chip shortages and rising costs as AI infrastructure expands.
A multidisciplinary research team proposes a way to pause frontier AI training for at least a decade: restrict the production of training-capable chips, account for existing hardware and replace it with specialised chips that can run approved AI models but cannot practically train new frontier systems.
The servers contained US-manufactured GPUs commonly used for Super Intelligence (SI) applications. Prosecutors allege that Lui and his co-conspirators used false paperwork and routed the equipment through Malaysia and Singapore before allegedly re-exporting it to China.
GPUs dominate the conversation, but memory is AI’s real constraint. Demand for HBM has outpaced supply so badly that industry leaders are warning the shortage will only get worse, even as billions are being poured into new plants to catch up.
Indium phosphide, a compound semiconductor made from indium and phosphorus, has become a critical enabler of the optical chips that move data inside AI data centres.
China has been accused of poaching talent from Taiwan in order to obtain AI and semiconductor technology.
