Advanced Packaging & Test (OSAT)

Yuanta Securities (Thailand) has maintained its Buy rating on Stars Microelectronics (Thailand), or SMT, and raised its end-2570 target price to 8.40 baht per share from 7.60 baht, based on a PER of 25 times, after lifting its 2570 profit forecast on the back of strength in the Optical business. The stock price as of September 30, 2569 stood at 6.05 baht, implying 38.8% upside to the target price. Yuanta's research team expects SMT to post normalized profit of 56 million baht in the third quarter of 2569, up 65% QoQ and a turnaround from a loss of 49 million baht in the third quarter of 2568. If achieved, this would mark a second consecutive quarter of normalized profit following eight straight quarters of losses, and is expected to be the highest profit in three years. Sales revenue in the third quarter of 2569 is expected at 780 million baht, up 10% QoQ and 41% YoY, driven by a recovery in the IC Packaging, PCBA & Box Build, and Optical businesses. Gross margin is expected to rise to 14.6% from 13.0% in the second quarter of 2569 and 1.4% in the third quarter of 2568. SG&A is expected at 69 million baht, flat QoQ and up 11.3% YoY. For the fourth quarter of 2569, the research team expects normalized profit to continue rising both QoQ and YoY on strong orders, particularly in the Optical business, where production for global customers is expected to ramp up gradually. Yuanta maintained its 2569 normalized profit forecast at 150 million baht, a turnaround from a loss of 146 million baht in 2568, and raised its 2570 normalized profit forecast to 282 million baht, up 88% YoY, or an average of about 70 million baht per quarter, from what it said was previously an overly conservative estimate. It expects revenue of 2.67 billion baht in 2569 and 3.204 billion baht in 2570, with EBITDA of 359 million baht and 510 million baht respectively. Core EPS in 2570 is put at 0.34 baht, up 88.1%. Yuanta noted that SMT's valuation remains a laggard, with the stock trading at a 2570 PER of about 18 times, while leading stocks in the sector trade in a range of 27 to 64 times. However, SMT's key risks are its high reliance on a single major customer and volatility tied to the industry cycle.

China's first 3D advanced packaging mass-production line, the second-phase project of the Xingchen Technology advanced packaging pilot platform, officially went live on September 30, with the first batch of wafers successfully coming off the line. Xingchen Technology is headquartered in Wuhan and was incubated by the Hubei Jiangcheng Laboratory. It focuses on integrated circuit 3D advanced packaging technology and is one of the few domestic companies with full capabilities in 3D heterogeneous integration, precise chiplet stacking, and multi-dimensional chip packaging process development and mass production. Its advanced packaging integrated experimental platform began construction in 2024, with total investment in phases one and two exceeding 7 billion yuan. Phase one has already gone live and has helped nearly 30 high-performance chips complete pilot tape-outs, while providing verification services for 35 domestic packaging equipment items and 11 types of specialized materials. The second-phase project that went live this time started construction in October 2025, further adding 2.5D capabilities on top of the existing 3D advanced packaging process platform. According to the plan, it will reach full production in the first quarter of 2027, forming a capacity of 20,000 wafers per month, and will be able to simultaneously support pilot production and risk mass production for 40 to 50 chip models, as well as application verification for 30 to 40 sets of domestic semiconductor equipment and materials. In May this year, Xingchen Technology completed a Series A financing round of nearly 5 billion yuan, of which newly introduced shareholder investment reached 4.5 billion yuan, setting a new record for the largest single financing in China's integrated circuit advanced packaging sector in 2026. Investors include Hillhouse Ventures, Sequoia China, Legend Capital, CICC Capital, CMB International Capital, and Shenzhen Capital Group. Jingce Electronic is the second-largest shareholder of Xingchen Technology, with a latest stake of approximately 16.9842 percent. By holding equity in Xingchen Technology, the company is actively expanding into the semiconductor advanced packaging sector and extending from front-end metrology equipment into the semiconductor manufacturing and packaging industry chain.

Kiatnakin Phatra Securities Public Company Limited, or KKPS, issued a research note dated 29 September 2026 recommending a "Buy" on KCE Electronics Public Company Limited, or KCE, with a target price of 104 baht, and maintaining a "Buy" on Hana Microelectronics Public Company Limited, or HANA, while raising its target price to 61 baht from 42 baht. It views both companies as entering a new growth cycle driven by a recovery in their core businesses and opportunities from artificial intelligence, or AI, related operations. For KCE, the research team sees it entering an upcycle in the printed circuit board, or PCB, business, expecting normal earnings per share to grow by about 95% in 2026 and 110% in 2027, which is about 69% above the market average. It expects net profit attributable to the company after excluding special items of about 1.529 billion baht in 2026, rising to 3.212 billion baht in 2027 and 4.174 billion baht in 2028. The communications business, especially PCBs for low Earth orbit, or LEO, satellites, is expected to increase its share to about 16% of PCB revenue in 2027 and 30% in 2028. As for HANA, KKPS raised its 2026 and 2027 earnings forecasts by 8% and 31% respectively, expecting profit growth of about 20% in 2026 and 53% in 2027, supported by a rise in capacity utilisation in its OSAT business in Ayutthaya province to 62% from 55%. It expects net profit attributable to the company after excluding special items of about 999 million baht in 2026, rising to 1.533 billion baht in 2027 and 1.78 billion baht in 2028. Meanwhile, two of HANA's three AI projects, Phononic TEC and High-density PCBA, have begun ramping up production and are expected to generate combined revenue of about 2.5 to 3.5 billion baht in 2027.

ASE Technology Holding Co., Ltd. reported August 2026 consolidated net revenue of $2.56 billion, or NT$82.25 billion, up 34.6% year-over-year in U.S. dollar terms. The company's core Assembly, Testing, and Material division, known as ATM, drove the surge with $1.59 billion, or NT$51.29 billion, in revenue, a 41.4% year-over-year jump. The monthly momentum builds on second-quarter 2026 results, when net revenue reached NT$191,064 million, up 26.7% year-over-year, and net income attributable to parent shareholders soared to NT$21,068 million. In that quarter, ATM revenue hit NT$126,148 million, up 36.3% year-over-year, with gross margin expanding 130 basis points sequentially to 27.3% and operating margin expanding to 15.7%. ASE shares rose 3.74% on the day of the August revenue release.

The main individual items announced on the 28th are as follows. NSD upwardly revised its consolidated earnings forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2027 and raised its year-end lump-sum dividend forecast from 97 yen to 100 yen. SBSHD will acquire all shares of Mitsubishi Chemical Logistics from Mitsubishi Chemical Group and make it a subsidiary. Chugai Pharma will discontinue development of GYM329 "Emgrobalt" for obesity. Happinet raised its consolidated operating profit forecast for the first half of the fiscal year ending March 2027 from 7.8 billion yen to 13.5 billion yen, as lottery products and trading cards performed well and hit products also emerged in capsule toys. AI Mekatek received orders for wafer-level packaging systems from two major overseas semiconductor-related manufacturers, with the order value at approximately 4.5 billion yen. Axel substantially upwardly revised its consolidated operating profit forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2027 to 2.29 billion yen, up 37.6 percent year on year, and increased its dividend forecast to 79 yen.

Marvell Technology has begun shipping custom Compute Express Link chips to Alphabet's Google and plans to lift its AI revenue outlook after deepening its custom silicon partnership with the company. Management expects large-scale custom AI inference silicon programs with Google to ramp through 2028, pointing to a multi-year engagement. The expanded Google engagement reinforces Marvell's bet on hyperscaler design wins and multi-year programs, and ties into its expanded SiGe and IC substrate agreements aimed at securing the manufacturing headroom those contracts require. The unresolved piece is concentration risk, as a bigger Google pipeline leans harder into dependence on a few large, lumpy projects and tight supply chains compared with more diversified rivals such as Broadcom or Intel.

Piper Sandler analyst Thomas Champion is projecting that Google's newly disclosed external chip business will generate $104 billion in TPU hardware revenue by 2028, a forecast the firm says the broader Street has yet to price in. Champion published the note after Google disclosed external hardware sales for the first time in its second-quarter 2026 earnings report, a milestone that triggered a formal reassessment of the revenue opportunity. The firm's model has TPU sales climbing from approximately $8 billion in 2026, or roughly 240,000 chips, to $51 billion in 2027, or approximately 2.4 million chips, and then to $104 billion in 2028, anchored to a facilities and power-capacity build-out of 3 gigawatts of run-rate capacity by the end of 2027 and 6GW by the end of 2028. Piper Sandler raised its price target on Alphabet to $400 from $395 and reiterated its Overweight rating, with its 2027 and 2028 Cloud revenue estimates now 15% and 17% above consensus and its Cloud EBIT estimates 18-19% above consensus. Champion also flagged that even these estimates may prove conservative, noting that Broadcom management recently spoke to 5GW of Anthropic demand in 2027 and 10GW in 2028, which Piper Sandler estimates as $105 billion and $210 billion in revenue if that capacity is achieved.

JPMorgan analysts said on the 28th that the recent correction in global AI-related trading has improved investors' positioning and made valuations more attractive, which could encourage investors to re-enter the market, particularly in semiconductor stocks. In a report, they noted that tech may not return to past peak levels, but the underlying scenario remains positive and there are many investment opportunities within the AI-related sector. They said investor positioning in the AI space has been cleaned up and valuations have fallen sharply across most areas, while capital expenditure is likely to remain solid despite recent slowdown concerns. On semiconductor stocks, they maintained a bullish outlook citing strong fundamentals, price increases through 2027, and supply-demand tightness expected to persist until 2028, while keeping a cautious stance on software stocks, assessing that AI growth continues to leave the sector's long-term outlook uncertain.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is accelerating its 2-nanometre capacity expansion, with monthly output projected to reach about 120,000 wafers by the end of 2026, ahead of earlier expectations of 90,000 to 100,000 wafers, according to Taiwanese publication EDN. Customers including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and MediaTek have recently raised orders for TSMC's 2nm family capacity by 10% to 20%, the report said, citing industry sources. TSMC is bringing five 2nm fabs online this year, two in Hsinchu and three in Kaohsiung, according to senior vice president Hou Yung-ching. Hou said first-year 2nm wafer output would be 45% higher than the first-year output of 3nm in 2023, while 2nm capacity is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 70% from 2026 to 2028.

SCHMID shares surged nearly 20% by Friday afternoon trading after a report revealed that advanced chipmakers were considering the use of glass substrates in processors. The technology could increase the amount of high-bandwidth memory in chips, boosting processing speeds for AI workloads. SCHMID Chief Sales Officer Roland Rettenmaier said on the company's second-quarter 2026 earnings call that many players in the Intel, Nvidia and AMD supply chains are eyeing glass core substrates for their flatness, smoothness, dielectric constants and signal integrity, and that the German-based company is engaged with most major supply chain players to make glass core substrates real. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently met with the chairman of SK Group to discuss using glass substrate technology in next-generation semiconductors, according to Seoul Economic Daily, and has reportedly discussed it with TSMC as well. SCHMID specializes in high-tech manufacturing for electronics, photovoltaics, glass and energy systems, and has been developing glass substrate solutions that offer thinner, smoother packaging material to raise chip speeds and cut power consumption.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is establishing an advanced-packaging testing and training hub in Kaohsiung that will let suppliers test equipment and materials alongside the chipmaker before those technologies reach production. Two buildings are expected to open in late 2029, and TSMC has said the setup could make validation 25% to 50% more efficient. The company's U.S. shares rose about 0.4% to $453.02 around 10:28 a.m. ET Friday, based on Thursday's $451.15 close. The article notes that faster testing is not the same as more chips ready to sell, and that the shares sit 24.45% above GuruFocus's $364.01 GF Value estimate.

Advanced Micro Devices crossed the $1 trillion market capitalization mark for the first time on Monday, with shares surging 9.9% amid a broader tech-stock rally. The milestone caps a September in which CEO Lisa Su sat at President Trump's table during the state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, two seats from Trump and next to Elon Musk, and rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange with first lady Melania Trump. AMD stock is up 193% year to date, far outpacing Nvidia's 22% gain. The chipmaker beat Wall Street expectations across the board for the second quarter, posting record non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.66 against consensus estimates of $1.61, with total revenue up 50% year over year to a record $11.5 billion and data center revenue more than doubling to $6.7 billion. AMD projected second-half 2026 server CPU revenue to grow 80% year over year and 70% in 2027, and expects data center revenues to more than double in 2027 with AI GPUs growing well over 100%. The company also unveiled its next-generation Instinct MI450 Series GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC Venice CPUs for its Helios rack-scale AI systems, alongside deals for Microsoft to deploy Helios across Azure AI services beginning in the second half of 2026 and for Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs beginning in the first half of 2027, a deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars over time, with AMD committing to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.

The Board of Investment has succeeded in attracting Infineon Technologies Manufacturing (Thailand) Co., Ltd., Germany's leading chipmaker, to invest more than 48 billion baht and officially open a new semiconductor plant in Samut Prakan province on 1 October 2026, with the Prime Minister presiding over the ceremony. The plant will be the company's third Power Module production hub, after Germany and China, covering the production of power control chip systems, semiconductor testing, and the establishment of Thailand's first large-scale semiconductor product research and development centre. Under the investment promotion conditions, the company must develop at least 600 Thai personnel in science and technology, comprising more than 400 production-line engineers and more than 200 research and development staff, as well as send more than 130 Thai personnel for specialised technology training abroad and develop at least 14 Thai entrepreneurs, with research and development expenses of no less than 2.8 billion baht. Narit Therdsteerasukdi, Secretary-General of the Board of Investment, said this investment is one reflection of the fact that Thailand's industrial base is ready to receive investment under the national semiconductor strategy, which was approved by the semiconductor board chaired by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas on 24 September 2026. The strategy aims to attract at least 500 billion baht in investment in the first five years and 2.5 trillion baht by 2050, generating industrial revenue of more than 5 trillion baht per year and creating at least 230,000 additional high-skilled jobs.

Onto Innovation has raised its full-year 2026 advanced packaging growth outlook to at least 80% from more than 50% previously, citing strong demand for its Dragonfly G5 inspection platform. The company generated $343.1 million of quarterly revenue, up 35.3% year over year, while its inspection business, dominated by Dragonfly systems, grew approximately 30% sequentially on demand from 2.5D logic and HBM applications. Onto launched Dragonfly G5 in March 2026 and disclosed in April that the platform had been qualified for 2.5D AI packaging applications, with demand strongest among HBM manufacturers and AI-focused OSATs, including more than $200 million in Dragonfly orders from a single OSAT, most slated for 2027. Management said demand for the Dragonfly platform is expected to grow more than 50% in 2026 from 2025 and expects further growth in 2027 with no signs of customer overcapacity. Competitors are also benefiting from the same AI-driven spending: KLA now expects 2026 wafer fabrication equipment spending in the low-$150 billion range, up from $135-$140 billion, and Applied Materials expects advanced packaging revenue to grow more than 70% in 2026, up from its prior outlook of more than 50%.

Trio-Tech reported fourth-quarter non-GAAP earnings of $0.02 per share on revenue of $14.9 million, up 39.3% year over year. Total backlog stood at $24.2 million at June 30, 2026, compared with $11.0 million a year earlier, with SBS backlog of approximately $19.8 million and IE backlog of approximately $4.4 million. Net cash provided by operating activities rose to $3.4 million from $0.4 million in fiscal 2025, while cash, cash equivalents, short-term deposits and restricted term deposits totaled approximately $28.5 million, versus approximately $19.5 million at June 30, 2025. The company said it enters fiscal 2027 with continued demand for semiconductor back-end testing services across AI, high-performance computing and automotive applications, including EV and autonomous-vehicle semiconductors. During fiscal 2026, Trio-Tech delivered approximately $6.3 million of the previously announced $14.2 million in burn-in board-related orders, leaving approximately $7.9 million still to be delivered, and in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 it received an additional purchase order of approximately $1.5 million.

Lam Research drew fresh attention after management lifted its 2026 wafer fab equipment outlook to the low US$150b range while also flagging a sharp expected rise in advanced packaging revenue. The stock has risen 14.1% over the past week but is down about 19% across the last three months, even as its year-to-date share price return sits near 66% and its 1 year total shareholder return is about 141%. The current share price of $307.16 sits well below a narrative fair value of $423.85, a gap that hinges on how the AI driven memory cycle plays out. On earnings multiples the picture is tougher, with the stock trading on a 52.9x P/E, above both the peer average of 46.9x and a fair ratio of 44.6x. The narrative could break if memory makers pull back capex faster than expected or if China restrictions tighten and compress wafer fab demand.

Broadcom expects AI chip revenue of roughly $115 billion in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion in fiscal 2028, according to Reuters, a target that doubles the delivery test for the custom AI chip and networking supplier. The company reported $16.7 billion in fiscal third-quarter AI semiconductor revenue, about 56% of its $29.59 billion total. Shares fell about 2% to $348.02 at 10.40am ET on Thursday morning as investors weighed the promise against execution risk. At that price, Broadcom trades 15.36% below the $411.18 GF Value cited by GuruFocus. Doubling AI sales in a year demands that chips be made, packaged and delivered on schedule, and any slip in supply or customer deployments would leave the revenue target offering little comfort.

Teradyne reported Q2 revenues of $1.33 billion, up 104% year on year, exceeding analysts' expectations by 9.3% and posting the biggest analyst estimate beat and highest guidance raise among the 14 semiconductor manufacturing stocks tracked. The company, a US-based supplier of automated test equipment for semiconductors, also beat analysts' EPS and operating income estimates, and its stock is up 20.8% since reporting, trading at $387.50. Across the group, revenues beat consensus estimates by 3.5% while next quarter's revenue guidance came in 6.5% above expectations, and share prices are up 7.2% on average since the latest earnings results. Kulicke and Soffa reported revenues of $330.4 million, up 123% year on year and 5.7% above expectations, the fastest revenue growth of the group, though its stock is down 3.2% since reporting at $90.86. KLA Corporation reported revenues of $3.66 billion, up 15.2% year on year and 1.3% above expectations, with its stock down 1.5% at $188.03, while Entegris reported revenues of $883.2 million, up 11.5% and 5.5% above expectations, with its stock up 19.8% at $149.97, and Amtech reported revenues of $22.38 million, up 14.5% and 4.1% above expectations, with its stock down 5.2% at $15.19.

CLSA's Bhavtosh Vajpayee said the AI semiconductor cycle will not peak in 2028, calling that expectation "utterly wrong" and projecting the current chip shortage will persist until roughly 2030. Speaking to CNBC on Wednesday, Vajpayee said demand for GPUs and custom AI chips currently exceeds supply by about 73%, and he expects upstream semiconductor and hardware companies to benefit as the shortage worsens alongside expanding AI infrastructure spending. He also noted that large semiconductor companies trade at lower valuation multiples than many other parts of the AI ecosystem. Vajpayee highlighted Meta's Muse as a notable recent development for making AI agent creation easier through simple language commands, and said similar advances should emerge in China, where companies including Alibaba are developing smaller AI models. He pointed to Apple as particularly important because smartphones already sit at the center of consumers' daily lives and could become the primary gateway for accessing AI services, while CLSA sees clearer opportunities in AI hardware suppliers than among model developers, where he said it remains too early to determine the eventual winners.

Super Micro Computer has begun commercial shipments of server systems built around NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, sending its shares down more than 3% Thursday afternoon. The company is shipping Vera Rubin NVL72 racks through its Data Center Building Block Solutions, combining computing hardware with liquid cooling, networking, storage and power components; each rack design uses 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs. Super Micro said the platform can support deployments ranging from five-megawatt projects to data centers spanning gigawatt-scale capacity, and that a scalable unit can include 16 compute racks with 1,152 Rubin GPUs and 331 terabytes of HBM4 memory. At a Sept. 10 Goldman Sachs conference, Senior Vice President Michael Staiger said the company had about $60 billion in orders backing its fiscal 2027 revenue forecast of $65 billion to $72 billion. The company sees demand from neocloud operators, enterprises and sovereign customers.

Teradyne has introduced Iris 100, a production-ready optical test platform for microLED devices used in augmented-reality displays and optical interconnects for AI data centers, expanding its AI test portfolio against KLA Corporation and Cohu. The system measures individual emitters across arrays containing millions of microLEDs and integrates with Teradyne's UltraFLEXplus platform for combined optical and electrical testing, supporting wafer and final testing with advanced parallelization and image processing for high-throughput production. AI-driven revenues represented more than 60% of Teradyne's second-quarter 2026 revenues, while total revenues surpassed $1.3 billion, more than doubling year over year. Within that quarter, Semi Test revenues increased 128% year over year, compute revenues surged nearly 600%, and Product Test revenues rose 26% to $107 million. For the third quarter of 2026, Teradyne expects revenues in the range of $1.20-$1.30 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 earnings is pegged at $9.10 per share, unchanged over the past 30 days and suggesting 129.80% year-over-year growth, while Teradyne shares have surged 101% year to date.

NVIDIA ended the second quarter of fiscal 2027 with $279 billion in supply and capacity commitments, up from $119 billion in the first quarter, with most tied to memory and manufacturing facilities for current and future data center products. The company reported $96.22 billion in second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenues, up 106% year over year, while Data Center revenues surged 117% to $89.02 billion, and it guided third-quarter revenues to $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, implying 89.5% year-over-year growth. NVIDIA expects fiscal 2028 revenue growth of about 70%, though supply constraints could limit how quickly it meets demand, and it warns that changing demand could make the commitments difficult to reduce. Rivals are expanding as well: AMD's Data Center revenues rose 107% year over year to $6.7 billion in the second quarter of 2026, with Anthropic planning to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450-series GPUs on the Helios rack-scale platform and Microsoft deploying Helios at scale on Azure, while Intel's second-quarter revenues rose 25% to $16.13 billion and its Data Center and AI revenues surged 59% to $6.26 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NVIDIA's fiscal 2027 revenues stands at $406.05 billion, an 88% year-over-year increase, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 17.11 versus the sector's average of 21.45.

Nordson reported record fiscal Q3 2026 results and raised its full-year guidance, driven by stronger Advanced Technology Solutions demand in semiconductor packaging and electronics manufacturing. The company's shares have returned 33.35% year to date and 45.85% over one year on a total shareholder return basis, though they pulled back 3.75% over the past month. Nordson's most followed valuation narrative pegs fair value at about $319.13, just under the recent $321.42 close, with 14 investors seeing the stock as 1% overvalued. The bull case rests on accelerating demand for advanced technology solutions as customers ramp capacity for AI, cloud, and advanced consumer devices, plus backlog strength in semiconductor-related ATS orders and smooth acquisition integration, both of which could prove more fragile than current models imply.

Japanese stocks look set to catch up with a global AI-led rally when trading resumes Thursday, with Nikkei 225 futures in Osaka trading about 1.4% above Friday's settlement of the underlying gauge after the Silver Week holiday. Chip-equipment makers Tokyo Electron and Advantest are expected to be among the biggest winners, according to Hu You, a senior research analyst at iFast Financial in Singapore, who also flagged chip package substrate maker Ibiden and memory maker Kioxia Holdings. The yen traded around 157.28 per dollar in Tokyo after a four-day losing streak, its longest since late August, keeping traders alert to intervention risk following the Bank of Japan's Friday rate hike and its signal that further tightening remains possible. The BOJ move, which disappointed yen traders for its lack of clearer guidance, also leaves bond traders facing a volatile reopen, with iFast's Hu You saying the hike sets a higher floor for short-term rates and is fundamentally negative for front-end JGB prices. The global AI trade has gathered steam on early signs of success for Meta Platforms' new AI agent and Alibaba Group Holding's unveiling of what it calls China's most powerful AI chip, though overnight weakness in US equities and rising oil prices may temper the optimism.

Synopsys announced new collaborations with TSMC spanning A14 design enablement, AI-assisted engineering workflows, CoWoS support for multi-die designs, and unified multiphysics signoff. The companies said Synopsys has achieved A14 certification across digital and analog flows and enabled agentic AI capabilities, giving customers a methodology spanning implementation through signoff to accelerate design convergence on TSMC A14 technology. In analog design, Synopsys is collaborating with TSMC on device routing enablement on A14, a key milestone for advanced analog place-and-route automation. Synopsys said its 3DIC Compiler platform now enables designers to co-design and simulate integrated voltage regulators on TSMC CoWoS technology in a unified environment, and that it continues to work with TSMC on co-packaged optics design on TSMC COUPE technology. On TSMC's N2P process, Synopsys achieved key IP enablement and tape-out milestones for AI and HPC designs including PCIe 7.0, HBM4, LPDDR6/5X/5, 224G Ethernet PHY, UCIe, OTP, and advanced SLM process, voltage, and temperature monitoring IP, and recently completed 64G UCIe IP tape-outs on both 2nm and 3nm process nodes.

Intel Corporation can supply only about half of the processor demand its customers are asking for, chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said at Splunk's .conf26 conference in Denver this month, adding that other chief executives have called him asking for more chips and that he has had to apologize. The company has pointed to constraints across leading-edge wafers, memory and substrates, and its latest quarterly report lists industry-wide substrate and memory shortages among the risks to its supply chain. In May of this year, Tan said Intel had asked customers adopting its advanced packaging to help prepay Taiwanese and Japanese suppliers to secure capacity, with four suppliers in Taiwan and two in Japan seeking upfront commitments. Intel's second quarter revenue reached $16.1 billion, comfortably above the midpoint of its own guidance, and the stock rose 12% on September 21 in a broad rally across chip stocks. The number to watch when Intel reports in October is whether shipments actually rise, because that is the only place the unmet demand can show up as revenue.

Supermicro is now shipping NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks integrated with its Data Center Building Block Solutions and DLC-2 direct liquid cooling stack, the company announced from San Jose, California. Each NVL72 rack holds 72 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Vera CPUs operating as one machine, with 20.7 TB of HBM4 memory and up to 54 TB of LPDDR5X, connected through nine sixth-generation NVIDIA NVLink switch trays delivering 216 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth. Supermicro's DCBBS Blueprint defines a balanced bill-of-materials for a given power envelope, from 5 MW to gigawatt scale, and one Vera Rubin NVL72 Scalable Unit provides 1,152 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs with 331 TB of HBM4 memory across 16 compute racks. The company said its in-row cooling distribution units are rated at 1.8MW per CDU and deployed with N+1 redundancy, with optional Rear Door Heat Exchangers capturing residual heat load. President and CEO Charles Liang said Supermicro designs and builds every layer between the cold plate and the cooling tower, and that customers can now order a Scalable Unit and receive production-ready systems with end-to-end integration.

SMT shares surged 7.63%, or 0.45 baht, to 6.35 baht on trading value of 284.40 million baht, leading the electronics group higher across the board. KCE rose 1.49% to 68.00 baht, HANA gained 1.47% to 51.75 baht, DELTA added 1.19% to 255 baht, and CCET climbed 1.12% to 9.05 baht. Yuanta Securities (Thailand) said Star Microelectronics (Thailand) Public Company Limited, or SMT, posted second-quarter 2026 results that clearly reflect a recovery in revenue, capacity utilisation, and margins. The company guided 2026 revenue of no less than 2.6 billion baht and expects growth of more than 10% in 2027, or above 3 billion baht. It sees Optical and OSAT as new growth engines driven by AI. Although AI-related revenue still accounts for less than 5% of current revenue, it has the potential to rise to at least 10% next year. On valuation, the stock currently trades at a PER of about 19 times, significantly below the group's 28 to 58 times. The broker maintained its end-2027 target price of 7.60 baht per share, based on a PER of 25 times, and kept its 2026 normal profit forecast at 150 million baht, a turnaround from a loss of 146 million baht in 2025, before rising to 256 million baht in 2027, up 70% year on year.