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Explore the latest semiconductor news and technology.
Facing surging AI-driven demand, Samsung has raised supply prices for new customers by about 15% on its advanced 4nm process and other nodes. With full utilization expected in the second half of 2026, the company is shifting from a discount-driven order strategy to one focused on profitability—though success hinges on stable yields and sustained earnings improvement.
SK hynix listed on NASDAQ on July 10, 2026, raising $26.5 billion in what became the largest IPO ever by a foreign company. Yet its projected PER remains far below the industry median, leaving the question of whether the 'Korea discount' has truly been resolved still unanswered.
Micron announced plans to invest over $250 billion in the U.S. through 2035 and has begun groundwork at its new New York plant. While the company is also strengthening its material supply chain, the new facility isn't expected to start production until 2030 or later—meaning the results of this massive investment remain years away.
To overcome the scaling limits of silicon, a new technology has been developed for synthesizing single-crystal molybdenum disulfide at wafer scale. Through self-aligned crystal growth and an automatic thickness self-limiting mechanism, an atomically thin semiconductor film with extremely few defects has been realized, marking a major step forward in the practical implementation of next-generation devices.
Samsung is reportedly developing a PC AI accelerator called "GAIA," advancing prototype verification with Lenovo and others toward mass production targeted for 2027. The chip will use a 4nm process, and cooperation with in-memory computing technology is also reportedly being considered, though power consumption and software support remain challenges for practical deployment.
SK hynix is set to resume equipment investment at its second NAND fab in Dalian, China. The company aims to bring it online by the first half of 2027, seeking to boost NAND supply capacity ahead of the completion of its new fab in Korea. However, completing the plan hinges on continued approval for equipment imports under U.S. export controls.
A research team from Diraq and imec has succeeded in individually controlling eight qubits arranged in a line, fabricated using a standard 300mm silicon manufacturing process. While the result demonstrates the scalability of the fabrication platform, challenges remain in achieving stable gate operations across all qubits and maintaining production yield at scale.
French company ZML has released a free LLM inference server supporting five major accelerators, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Google. It stands out for unifying the inference environment without locking users into a specific chip, and claims a 10x performance boost for certain models through its proprietary acceleration technology.
In-memory computing, which performs calculations directly within memory, is drawing attention as a way to improve AI power efficiency. A joint US-Korean research team has developed a proprietary memristor SoC with zigzag wiring to eliminate the inefficiency of operations widely used in lightweight AI models, demonstrating extremely high power efficiency that surpasses existing GPUs.
In the DRAM market, legacy products continue to inch up due to uneven supply capacity allocation, while in the NAND market, prices are falling as buyers hold back purchases in the face of high prices—revealing a growing polarization behind the seemingly bullish AI demand narrative. This contrasting movement exposes both supply constraints and the limits of buyers, and going forward, trading volume trends will be key to the market's direction.
