According to a South Korean media report, Samsung Electronics activated an emergency management system for its semiconductor production lines one week before a general strike.

According to South Korean media reports, Samsung Electronics' union estimates that the 18-day strike could cause losses of up to 30 trillion won. This figure includes an estimated 18 trillion won reduction in operating profit (1 trillion won per day), plus 12 trillion won in losses resulting from the time needed to return to normal operations after the strike ends. Due to the nature of semiconductor manufacturing processes, production lines will require a considerable amount of time to resume normal operation even after the strike ends. Hundreds of precision machines performing nanometer-level processes need recalibration, defective wafers must be discarded, and yields need to be improved until products meet target quality standards. All of them requires a stabilization period. Kim Dong-won, head of research at KB Securities, said: "Assuming the worst-case scenario, even if the strike ends, restarting the automated production lines and resuming normal operations would most likely take two to three weeks."

Since April, Memory sector stocks both domestically and internationally have successively climbed to new highs, reflecting sustained market exuberance. After the Labor Day holiday, selling pressure on the trade side has gradually eased. Some traders, seeing current prices at near two-month lows, have started bargain-hunting, leading to an initial rebound in channel brand Memory retail trading prices. However, recent rebound momentum has weakened amid volatility.

According to Taiwanese media reports, Wallace. Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, predicts that driven by the shift of AI investment focus toward inference, NAND Flash could face shortages all the way through 2028, and Memory prices will continue to rise in the second half of this year. He noted that North American cloud service providers have been actively signing long-term contracts with chipmakers to secure production capacity. However, even if major Memory manufacturers start expanding production now, it cannot immediately relieve supply constraints. As the short-term supply-demand gap remains difficult to bridge, Memory prices will keep rising in the second half of this year, though the increase may be smaller than that seen in the first half.

Qualcomm has launched two new mobile platforms, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 and Snapdragon 4 Gen 5, both featuring the company's new Snapdragon Smooth Motion UI technology designed to comprehensively enhance the smoothness of everyday smartphone interactions. The Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 supports up to 16GB of LPDDR4X-4200 or LPDDR5-6400 RAM and UFS 3.1 flash storage, while the Snapdragon 4 Gen 5 supports LPDDR4X-4267 RAM and dual-channel UFS 3.1 storage. Devices powered by these two SoCs are expected to launch in the second half of 2026.

Chung-Won Shu, Chairman of Transcend, stated that artificial intelligence has triggered a comprehensive boom in Taiwan's hardware industry. In particular, the Memory industry has entered a super cycle. He expects that DRAM and NAND Flash will face shortages not only this year but definitely next year, and could still remain in short supply as late as 2028. He predicts that prices will continue to rise, though whether end applications can absorb the sustained price increases requires close monitoring.

On May 8, AMD officially launched DGF Super Compression Technology, named DGFS, through the GPU Open platform. Building on the existing Dense Geometry Format (DGF), this technology further optimizes the disk storage efficiency of geometric models, reducing file sizes by up to 22%, while fully supporting operation and decoding in non-DGF hardware environments. According to test data, in terms of raw storage usage, DGFS saves an additional 17% to 31% of disk space compared to the standard DGF format across five test models. In gaming scenarios, DGFS data is not persistently stored in Memory. When GDeflate compression is applied to the data, DGFS is about 20% smaller than DGF.

ADATA's consolidated revenue for April reached NT$10.56 billion, up 4.6% month-on-month and a sharp 170% year-on-year, marking a new all-time monthly high for two consecutive months. ADATA believes the supply gap will continue to widen, and the market will remain in a supply shortage throughout 2027.

Overall, although the spot market has shown divergence in the short term due to adjustments in demand structure, the server DRAM market continues to operate strongly against the backdrop of persistent price hikes by original makers and tight supply. The original makers' price benchmark is expected to continue shifting upward in the second quarter.

Samsung Electronics' latest financial results show that in Q1 2026 its revenue reached 133.9 trillion South Korean won, up 43% quarter-on-quarter and 69% year-on-year. Operating profit stood at 57.2 trillion won, surging 184.6% quarter-on-quarter and 7.5 times year-on-year. Net profit hit 47.2 trillion won, rising 140.5% quarter-on-quarter and 4.8 times year-on-year. Its Q1 Memory business revenue came in at 74.8 trillion won, up 101% quarter-on-quarter and 292% year-on-year. Samsung Electronics stated that its HBM shipments in the first quarter more than tripled year over year. Starting from Q2 2026, the company plans to supply prototype products of its 7th-generation HBM (HBM4E) to key customers. It expects HBM4 shipments to account for over half of total HBM shipments beginning in the third quarter.

The current Memory market is in a phase of stark contrast. Driven still by the dominant logic of AI, contract prices for server NAND and DRAM from original manufacturers — despite the high base from a violent doubling surge last quarter — continue to maintain significant room for price increases in Q2. The PC market, in order to secure supply support, is absorbing even higher price hikes, with contract prices increasingly converging toward those of the server market. Meanwhile, the mobile phone market is experiencing some divergence in original manufacturers' supply and pricing strategies due to certain non-market factors, though mobile Memory prices generally remain on an upward trend.

NVIDIA has released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, an open-source omni-modal model that continues the "Nano" positioning, emphasizing high cost-performance and inference efficiency. The model involves approximately 30 billion total parameters and supports ultra-long context windows of up to one million tokens. The model adopts a 30B-A3B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and integrates Mamba layers with Transformer layers at the architectural level. According to official data, this hybrid design improves Memory and computational efficiency by up to 4 times. When benchmarked under a fixed user interaction latency threshold, the model achieves approximately 9.2× higher effective system capacity for video reasoning tasks compared to other open omni-modal models, and approximately 7.4× higher effective system capacity for multi-document reasoning tasks. Companies in AI and software sectors such as Foxconn and Palantir have already adopted the new model, while Dell and Oracle are currently evaluating it.

Longsys released its first-quarter report for 2026. In 2026Q1, the company achieved operating revenue of RMB 9.909 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 132.79%. Net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company reached RMB 3.862 billion, up 2,644.05% year-on-year. After deducting non-recurring gains and losses, the net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company stood at RMB 3.943 billion, a year-on-year surge of 2,051.40%.

According to South Korean media reports, Samsung Electronics has produced a working die for a sub-10 nanometer DRAM process. Industry sources said that Samsung identified a functioning die during testing of wafers fabricated last month using its 10a process. The result reflects the first application of a 4F² cell architecture and a vertical channel transistor (VCT) structure. It is understood that Samsung aims to complete the development of 10a DRAM this year, conduct quality testing next year, and begin mass production in 2028. The company plans to use the 4F² and VCT structures across three generations — 10a, 10b and 10c — before transitioning to 3D DRAM at 10d.

SK Hynix expects that in the second quarter, DRAM bit shipments will increase 7%-9% quarter-on-quarter, and NAND bit shipments (including Solidigm) will increase 16%-17% quarter-on-quarter.