Highlights
Jensen and Lutnick at G20. There are two major gatherings going on in the world right now. The first is the G20 summit in North Carolina. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sat down with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to talk about a set of guidelines that the Trump administration is pushing G20 members to sign. They’re called the Carolina Principles and they effectively advocate for less regulation over AI and more collaboration between government and industry. Jensen Huang is of course a strong advocate for this, calling on every country to develop their own AI, which would open up a whole new customer base for Nvidia.
In a separate comment, Secretary Lutnick said that the Trump administration is still pursuing tariffs on semiconductors are the US government seeks to move chip manufacturing to the United States from Asia. Lutnick reaffirmed that the administration would consider waiving tariffs for any firms building capacity and investing in the United States, a condition that was publicly floated last year.
At SEMICON Taiwan. The second gathering is SEMICON Taiwan, an industry conference in Taiwan. There, a Taiwanese government official said that the island’s companies would invest US$20 billion in the United States. This is perhaps a response to the potential threat of tariffs.
At the conference, TSMC said that the company’s demand for chipmaking equipment has roughly doubled year-to-date as AI demand for chip manufacturing has skyrocketed.
TSMC also spoke of a new bottleneck: lack of experienced construction workers in Taiwan. TSMC is trying to expand production at a faster rate than they ever have before.
Broadcom forecast disappoints. Broadcom’s quarterly earnings forecast disappointed investor expectations. Despite clinching major deals to co-design chips, including with Google’s TPU and OpenAI’s Jalapeno chips, Broadcom does not have their own flagship chip line, making their business model slightly different. The American chip giant, which shot past US$1 trillion market cap last year, is up less than 6% this year, far behind other chip firms.
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1. Policy and Geopolitics
1.1
Bloomberg (09/02): Nvidia’s Huang Urges G20 to Speed AI Adoption, Spur Growth
Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang called on Group of 20 nations to accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence as a way to enhance growth, urging the world’s largest economies to expand data centers and other infrastructure to support the emerging technology.
Huang spoke during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the event, where Trump administration officials are pressing G20 members to adopt a set of guidelines for overseeing new technologies like AI. Dubbed the Carolina Principles, the document cautions nations against creating new regulatory bodies for AI while urging closer collaboration between governments and private industry to test emerging technologies.
1.2
Korea Times (09/03): Lutnick: Trump gov’t considering ‘targeted,’ thoughtful’ tariff policy for semiconductors
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s administration is working to craft a “targeted” and “thoughtful” tariff policy for semiconductors, reiterating that companies that produce products in the United States would not pay duties.
During a CNBC interview, Lutnick confirmed that the administration is working on the envisioned tariffs, after Politico, a media outlet, reported last week that it is weighing new chip tariffs despite warnings from tech companies that the move could doom U.S. hopes of dominating artificial intelligence.
1.3
Reuters (09/02): Taiwan says its companies plan to invest another $20 billion in US
Taiwanese companies are planning another $20 billion of investments in the U.S. driven by demand for AI applications, the island’s economy minister said on Wednesday without giving details, though drawing a warm response from a visiting U.S. official.
1.4
Korea Herald (09/02): SK chief’s Kioxia overture raises stakes in NAND race
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won is considering building a chip plant in Japan, potentially with NAND flash maker Kioxia, as the Korean conglomerate seeks deeper cooperation with its Japanese rival.
Joint production is “one option,” Chey said in an interview with the Asahi Shimbun published Tuesday during his visit to Tokyo. He also identified supply chain coordination and joint research and development as potential areas of cooperation.
“Japan is a highly attractive candidate in terms of both risk and culture,” Chey said, adding that SK had received proposals from several local governments interested in hosting the envisioned facility. He did not identify any potential locations.
2. Economy, Finance, and Business
2.1
Bloomberg (09/03): Broadcom Forecast Disappoints Investors After Nvidia Blowout
Broadcom Inc. gave a fourth-quarter forecast that missed analysts’ estimates, a sign it’s getting a slower payoff from the AI boom than some anticipated.
Revenue will be $34.8 billion in the period, which runs through October, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Though analysts predicted $35.1 billion on average, some estimates topped $36 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Broadcom shares fell about 4% in late trading after the report was released. The stock had been up 6.1% this year through the close, a performance that trailed the rallies enjoyed by many chip peers in 2026.
The outlook failed to measure up to a blockbuster forecast delivered by rival Nvidia Corp. last week. Broadcom has been trying to crack that company’s dominance of the AI processor industry by offering custom-made alternatives. Though Broadcom has landed some big customers in that effort, it’s still early in the process.
2.2
Bloomberg (09/02): Nvidia Partner Gets Strong Demand for Rare GPU-Tied Loan in Asia
GMI Cloud, an Nvidia Corp. partner, secured commitments for more than double the amount it was seeking in a loan backed by the sale of computing power from advanced chips, underscoring strong demand for one of the first such deals in Asia.
Around a dozen banks offered to lend the US-based data center operator about NT$30 billion ($947 million), according to people familiar with the matter. That far exceeds the NT$13.9 billion GMI Cloud sought. The loan is one tranche of a bigger financing deal backed by customer contracts to purchase computing resources.
A handful of other lenders have verbally committed and are seeking internal signoffs, the people said, adding that orders for the five-year loan would grow to about NT$40 billion if they’re successful. Discussions are ongoing and the details could change, they added.
The deal is one of the first times such an arrangement is being tested in Asia, after gaining popularity in the US as a way to fund artificial intelligence hardware. In GMI Cloud’s case, the banks’ money will be used to purchase computer chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, that will be used to train AI in a data center in Taiwan. The loan will be paid back using revenue generated from selling the chips’ computing power.
2.3
Bloomberg (09/02): Tencent-Backed Enflame’s IPO Draws 4,073 Times Retail Demand
The initial public offering of Shanghai Enflame Technology Co., a company backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., drew strong demand from retail investors, as the last of the so-called “four little dragons” of leading Chinese artificial intelligence chipmakers taps the public market.
The retail portion of the IPO was 4,073 times subscribed, with individual investors submitting 7 million orders for about 5.98 trillion yuan ($890 billion) of shares, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on an exchange filing released Wednesday. That compares to the 7.1-trillion-yuan retail order book in memory chipmaker CXMT Corp.’s blockbuster offering in July, the second-biggest China debut ever.
Enflame, in which Tencent holds a 20% stake and remains a dominant customer, priced its offering on Shanghai’s technology-heavy STAR Market at 142.18 yuan per share, raising about 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million). The sale will consist of about 43 million shares, or 10% of its enlarged share capital following the IPO.
3. Technology
3.1
Bloomberg (09/02): TSMC’s Quarterly Chipmaking Tool Needs Almost Doubled This Year
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s need for chipmaking tools has nearly doubled since the end of last year as it expands production to meet AI demand, a senior executive said.
The world’s biggest contract chipmaker has increased its own estimate of quarterly equipment purchases to about 1.9 times the amount it projected in December, Deputy Co-Chief Operating Officer Cliff Hou said in a fireside chat at Semicon Taiwan, an annual conference on the future of the industry. It marked the latest signal of overwhelming demand driven by artificial intelligence developers and the global build-out of data centers.
Hsinchu-based TSMC is also grappling with a lack of experienced construction workers in Taiwan, at a time when it’s trying to build and furnish about 20 factories both at home and overseas, an expansion intensity unprecedented in the company’s history. TSMC’s typical pace in the past would see it working on four or five new buildings simultaneously.
3.2
SCMP (09/02): China’s AMEC unveils 6 chip-making machines in a day, boosting self-reliance ambitions
Chinese chip equipment giant Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) has unveiled six new machines – at different stages of commercialisation – in a single day as the company accelerates research and development to feed soaring local demand driven by Beijing’s self-reliance push.
The new line-up, announced at an industry conference in Wuxi on Tuesday, spans several steps in chip production, including etching tools that carve microscopic patterns into wafers, deposition systems that build ultra-thin layers of material and the complex equipment used to make silicon-carbide power chips.
3.3
Reuters (09/01): Not just Nvidia: these power and cooling firms are riding the trillion-dollar data centre boom
While Nvidia is synonymous with the AI boom, a lesser-known group of power and cooling equipment suppliers is cashing in on a global data centre construction spree as developers race to avoid infrastructure bottlenecks.
Energy-hungry data centres have triggered a surge in demand for equipment ranging from transformers to advanced cooling systems, creating winners across Asia’s supply chain, though earlier stock-price gains have moderated.
3.4
Reuters (09/02): Spain’s iPronics raises $125 million from Nvidia, others for data center networking chips
Valencia, Spain-based startup iPronics said Tuesday that it has raised $125 million in venture capital with participation from Nvidia to shrink a new type of data center networking chip that could connect hundreds of thousands of computing chips.
iPronics is developing what is called an optical circuit switch, a type of switching chip made popular in data centers by Alphabet’s Google for its role in wiring up its AI supercomputers. Google’s success with the switches has inspired a wave of startups to bring them to the outside world.
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