Semicon Briefing

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are being sued: The lawsuit claims that the coordinated HBM transition was a pretext to artificially throttle DDR3/DDR4 production and drive up prices. The community largely considers the allegation baseless since DDR3 is obsolete technology anyway – however, a successful lawsuit could trigger billion-dollar penalties and supply chain risks.

On June 26, 2026, Qualcomm announced the acquisition of Modular for nearly $4 billion, solidifying its entry into the AI datacenter market. The deal signals that Qualcomm wants to pursue competition against Nvidia and AMD at the CPU/inference level much more aggressively.

SK Hynix plans to raise up to $29.4 billion through a Nasdaq ADR listing to finance new manufacturing facilities in South Korea and close the global HBM memory gap. This would be one of the largest technology IPOs of the year and would significantly intensify competition for AI memory market share.

ASML, TSMC and imec presented the first scalable 300mm integration line for 2D material transistors with 50nm CPP at the IEEE/JSAP VLSI Symposium 2026 – a milestone for the post-silicon era. This breakthrough could fundamentally influence the roadmap beyond 2nm and allow TSMC and ASML to further expand their technology advantage over Samsung and Intel.

Taiwan authorities raided Super Micro Computer offices as part of a criminal investigation into smuggling Nvidia A100/H100 GPUs to China – the stock fell 8% as a result. The case shows that US export controls are being systematically circumvented and could lead to significantly stricter compliance requirements for the entire server hardware sector.

Gartner named Infineon as a leader in AI datacenter power semiconductors, while strategic cooperation with Siemens in the power semiconductors sector was deepened. This double blow positions Infineon as a European champion in a segment experiencing explosive growth driven by the AI infrastructure boom.