Semicon Briefing

Samsung and SK Hynix are set to jointly invest over $1.3 trillion over 10 years – shareholders are reacting with price losses due to fears of massive capex pressure on margins. The market reaction shows the classic dilemma: strategically necessary, short-term expensive.

ON Semiconductor signed an all-stock merger with Synaptics on June 25, 2026 (1.35 onsemi shares per SYNA share), valuing the deal at approximately $7 billion – the company's largest acquisition to date. The strategic focus is on Physical-AI applications, namely edge inference in industrial robotics and automotive.

The EU has signed the US initiative 'Pax Silica', which aims to jointly secure the entire AI supply chain from critical minerals to fab software – explicitly directed against China. The initiative complements Chips Act 2.0 and marks a geopolitical shift: Europe officially chooses the US side in the semiconductor technology war.

Infineon opens its new power chip factory in Dresden as a flagship project of European technological sovereignty, supported with approximately one billion euros from the EU Chips Act. In parallel, xFab shows funding of €127 million for MEMS manufacturing in Erfurt – Europe is now implementing concrete construction projects, not just announcements.

For the first time since 2017, China has built the world's fastest supercomputer – entirely based on domestic CPUs, without US chips. Huawei's chairman officially thanked US export controls, which as an unintended side effect had massively accelerated China's domestic semiconductor industry.

Community analyses on Reddit show: the semiconductor industry physically cannot produce enough DRAM to meet CPU demand alone – nine additional simultaneously growing categories (HBM, LPDDR, GDDR for AI) are exacerbating the bottleneck. Micron and SK Hynix are likely to gain structural pricing power, which investors increasingly view as a supercycle signal.