Semicon Briefing

ASML increased its annual forecast for 2026 to €43–45 billion for the second time and plans to deliver around ten High-NA EUV systems, whose unit price is approximately double that of standard EUV. The announcement is a strong market barometer: it confirms that AI-driven chip demand is not a temporary phenomenon, but the entire semiconductor supply chain from equipment to wafers is under structural capacity pressure.

Samsung Foundry has won Anthropic as a customer for custom AI chips – following the Tesla AI5 order, a second industry signal confirming Samsung's 2nm yield improvement from 20% to 60% in 2026 commercially. The deal emerges directly because TSMC's 2nm capacity is completely booked through 2028, bringing Samsung back into play as a serious competitor in the leading-edge foundry market for the first time in years.

Intel Foundry announced design wins with AMD, NVIDIA, and OpenAI for 18A and 14A process technologies, while EMIB packaging yields have reached 98%. In parallel, the WSJ reports that Apple wants to shift iPhone chips – not just Mac chips – to Intel, transforming Intel Foundry's story from a restructuring narrative to a genuine TSMC challenger.

The European Commission approved €659 million in German state subsidies for four semiconductor sites under the European Chips Act; in parallel, Intel is investing €5 billion in its Irish Leixlip EUV plant and Infineon is opening the world's largest power semiconductor fab in Dresden with €1 billion in EU funding. The confluence of these decisions marks the transition of the EU Chips Act from political declarations of intent to concrete silicon.

Diodes Incorporated signed a definitive purchase agreement on July 10, 2026 for ElevATE Semiconductor at a base price of $250 million in cash plus up to $50 million in earnout to expand its analog and mixed-signal portfolio in the growing ATE market. The deal is part of a wave of semiconductor M&A in 2026 (ON Semi/Synaptics, Analog Devices/Empower, Infineon/ams-OSRAM) and shows that consolidation along the AI infrastructure supply chain continues to gain momentum.

A U.S. government official confirmed that NVIDIA is resuming shipments of H200 AI accelerators to China under the current export control framework – simultaneously, Washington is considering new HBM export restrictions following China's CXMT announcement of an $8.5 billion IPO and Micron's stock falling 7%. The emerging hybrid export regime (selective licenses instead of blanket bans) fundamentally changes the geopolitical game theory of the AI chip supply chain.