Semicon Briefing

China committed at the Trump-Xi summit to address US concerns about rare earth supply shortages (yttrium, scandium, neodymium, indium) and establish new bilateral trade and investment bodies – while chip export restrictions and Nvidia supplies remain unresolved. For the semiconductor industry, this means short-term relief on critical raw materials, but sustained uncertainty in advanced chip trade.

The US has granted conditional sales approvals for Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China – with a 25% revenue share for Washington and mandatory transit through US territory. However, Beijing sees this as a strategic lever, not goodwill, and Chinese companies now prefer Huawei chips according to Trump, making actual export volumes questionable.

Lattice Semiconductor has signed an acquisition agreement for AMI in a cash-and-stock transaction worth approximately $1.65 billion; closing is scheduled for Q3 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. The deal solidifies Lattice's position in the embedded controller and firmware security segment and signals ongoing consolidation in the mid-cap semiconductor space.

SkyWater shareholders have approved acquisition by quantum computing firm IonQ; the deal is expected to close in Q2/Q3 2026 and combines IonQ's quantum algorithms with SkyWater's US-only foundry capacity. This is the first merger directly linking quantum computing with semiconductor manufacturing – with potentially disruptive impact on defense and research contracts.

The semiconductor industry is urging the US Congress to extend the 35% investment tax credit from the CHIPS Act beyond December 31, 2026, as otherwise fabs whose construction begins after that date will be completely excluded – a total of $640 billion in planned US investments is at stake. If the extension fails, the reshoring strategy risks slowing precisely during a phase of peak geopolitical dependence.

NEW DEVELOPMENT versus previously published roadmaps: Reports suggest that Apple's pivot to Intel's 18A-P node (M7/A21) is volumetrically negligible for TSMC (Bernstein: 'too small to matter'), while TSMC is now accelerating 1-nm production plans through the Intel partnership in the EPIC ecosystem – Samsung structurally loses ground at the front-end leading edge. This deepens the two-tier society in the foundry industry sustainably.