According to South Korean media citing SK hynix and fire authorities on the 12th, a fire broke out around 9:55 a.m. (local time) on the second floor of Building M15X, located within SK Hynix's Cheongju plant in Heungdeok District, Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province. After the fire broke out, employees from M15 and M15X were immediately evacuated outdoors. Reports indicate that the company's firefighting team extinguished the fire in its early stages. Cheongju issued a disaster alert, advising nearby residents to avoid the area and vehicles to take detours due to concerns over potential fluoride leaks. According to the latest news, the fire department stated that the investigation found no gas leakage. SK hynix stated that initial control has been completed, and the company is investigating the specific circumstances, adding that production equipment is operating normally. A fire also broke out at SK hynix's Cheongju Site 4 on the 1st of this month.

TSMC announced its revenue report for May 2026. Consolidated revenue for May 2026 was approximately NT$416.975 billion, up 1.5% month-on-month and 30.1% year-on-year. Cumulative revenue from January to May reached approximately NT$19,618.004 billion, with an increase of 30.0% compared to the same period last year. TSMC's revenue remained high in May, indicating that the momentum of AI supply chain shipments has not significantly cooled. In particular, demand for NVIDIA's Blackwell and Rubin platforms, AMD's high-end AI accelerators, custom ASIC chips from US-based cloud service providers (CSPs), and component stocking for new Apple products are all progressing simultaneously, continuing to drive capacity utilization rates for 3nm, 5nm, and advanced packaging technologies.

According to Korean media reports, Samsung Electronics is pushing ahead with the construction of an advanced Semiconductor packaging (back-end process) plant in Gwangju, marking the company's first Semiconductor production base in the Honam region (its current facilities are mainly concentrated in the Chungcheong region). This will be Samsung Electronics' first new packaging facility in 35 years since the establishment of its Onyang plant. The project is also expected to include front-end production lines for DRAM and NAND flash memory. The investment plan is reportedly scheduled for discussion on the 29th during a meeting chaired by President Lee Jae-myung, which will include heads of major corporate groups including Samsung.

The core objective of the plan is to increase monthly DRAM capacity from the current approximately 550,000 wafers (which includes around 200,000 wafers produced at the Wuxi plant in China) to roughly one million wafers by 2030. This expansion will be heavily concentrated in the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster.

Semiconductors were undoubtedly the absolute powerhouse behind this impressive performance. In May, South Korea's Semiconductor exports skyrocketed by 169.4% year-on-year, reaching $37.16 billion, shattering the previous all-time high of $32.8 billion set in March.

Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun shipping the industry’s first 12-layer HBM4E samples to major global customers, further strengthening its leadership in the next-generation HBM market.

Solidigm announced new co-chief executive officers, Xin Guo and Richard Chin.

According to the latest reports from South Korean media, labor negotiations between Samsung Electronics and the union broke down again today (May 20). The Samsung Electronics union has officially announced that it will proceed with the general strike as planned tomorrow (May 21). Management has explicitly rejected the strike proposal. Calls from Samsung shareholders for an emergency arbitration process are growing increasingly urgent.

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."

According to ZDNet, citing industry sources, SK hynix is collaborating with Intel on the research and development of 2.5D packaging technology. It is reported that SK Hynix is considering adopting Intel's 2.5D packaging technology, known as “Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge” (EMIB), and is currently conducting tests to combine HBM and system Semiconductors with EMIB-embedded substrates supplied by Intel.

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%.

April 15, 2026 – ASML Holding N.V., the global leader in Semiconductor equipment, today released its first-quarter 2026 financial results. Driven by sustained investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, the company’s performance exceeded market expectations across the board, and it raised its full-year outlook. ASML reported first-quarter net sales of €8.8 billion (approximately RMB 70.7 billion), net income of €2.8 billion (approximately RMB 22.5 billion), and a gross margin of 53.0%. Due to seasonal factors, revenue declined sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2025, but rose 13.3% year-on-year.

By product, Semiconductor exports surged 151 percent to $32.84 billion from $13.06 billion a year earlier, supported by robust demand from global AI data centers.

According to South Korean media reports, Samsung Electronics has ordered over 70 lithography machines for PH1, the first phase of the P5 fab cluster at its Pyeongtaek Semiconductor production site, in preparation for the operation in 2027. These lithography machines required for Pyeongtaek P5 PH1 are from ASML and Canon, with approximately 20 of them being ASML's EUV exposure systems. P5 PH1 will be used for 1c-nm process DRAM production, manufacturing both general-purpose memory and HBM. Samsung Electronics is expected to begin installing patterning equipment for Pyeongtaek P5 PH1 starting in the second quarter of 2027, at which time the cleanroom construction for this phase will also be completed. The phase is expected to contribute production capacity within 2027, meeting the demands for NVIDIA's "Rubin" and other AI XPUs, and alleviating the current tight supply situation in the DRAM market.