AI news Aug 24, 2026

This week · posted August 23

The cheapest slab of material at the top of the chain is reportedly going up in price for the first time in more than three years — and the packaging house spending the most money says what it lacks is construction time, not capital.

Dan Nystedt is an Asian semiconductor supply-chain reporter and analyst at TriOrient, and he relays Taiwanese Chinese-language business coverage of the supply chain on X. He posted several relays that day. First: silicon wafers (the starting point of chip manufacturing, a disc of high-purity single-crystal silicon on which every circuit is built, and the most generic base material at the very top of the chain) are said to be going up across 6-inch, 8-inch and 12-inch sizes, the first substantial increase in more than three years, on the grounds that AI demand has finally absorbed a long-standing supply overhang (@dnystedt, 08-23). ⚠️ Read the basis closely: the original says individual product prices still vary, and the expected effect on company revenue is a 10% rise in average selling price — not 10% on every wafer. Second: Taiwan's five largest packaging and test houses will spend more than NT$460B, about US$14.4B, in capital this year, with ASE (the largest packaging and test house in the world) accounting for NT$335B, about US$10.5B, on its own; but ASE says its biggest problem now is how to speed up construction, tool installation and capacity ramp across 13 new builds and 8 conversions (@dnystedt, 08-23). Third: graphics card makers have already raised third-quarter prices and are working on a second round, with both dies and card memory short at once; total available card supply this quarter is estimated to shrink at least another 20%, and the steepest rises are on entry-level and older-generation cards — the capacity data centres took away is being paid for at the cheapest end of the consumer market (@dnystedt, 08-23).