Zero One Investment Research Daily Intelligence Brief, September 21, 2026

Acer's chief executive says memory makers protect margins as UMC signals 2027 increases

Top Market Signals

Acer's Chen calls the shortage narrow, sees 2027 reversal

Acer (2353 TT) chief executive Jason Chen told reporters that component prices will start reversing in the second half of 2027, and that the major memory suppliers are keeping the shortage message alive to hold their margins where they are. It is a rare case of a large buyer publicly casting the scarcity narrative as a commercial position the suppliers are choosing to hold.

Chen's specific claim is that the shortage is much narrower than the headlines. He said only high end DDR5 parts such as LPDDR5X-9600 and a few niche processors including NVIDIA's N1 and N1X are genuinely short, and that memory and solid state drive supply is otherwise ample. Because supplier pricing runs a few months ahead of retail, he expects PC prices to rise another 5% to 20% into the end of this year, flatten through 1H27, then fall.

That cuts against much of what this Blade has carried over the past week. Our 16 and 19 September editions ran Winbond president Chen Pei-ming saying customers are now negotiating supply into 2029 and 2030, and our 17 and 19 September editions ran Apple accepting a 30% to 40% memory increase for 1Q27 a full quarter early. SK Hynix has said pricing does not normalize until 2030 and Adata's chief has put the DRAM shortage at another ten years. Chen does not dispute that those parts are tight; he challenges the breadth of the shortage and its timeline, putting the reversal in 2H27.

His mechanism for the reversal is Chinese supply. Chen argued that cheaper Chinese memory will disrupt the market, and he is not speaking hypothetically: Acer, HP and ASUSTeK already use CXMT parts in some products, and Lenovo machines sold in Germany have been found with YMTC solid state drives. He also noted that price increase requests are now arriving from suppliers of solid state drives, printed circuit boards and the fiberglass cloth used in motherboards.

Linked stocks: 2353 TT, 2357 TT, 2344 TT, 000660 KS

UMC signals a 2027 wafer price increase

United Microelectronics (2303 TT) has told the market that if current supply and demand holds, next year's foundry price adjustments will be larger and broader than those in 2H26. Powerchip (6770 TT) is separately reported to be preparing increases of up to 40% on some products, which it declined to comment on while confirming that customer demand is strong.

The reason is that mature nodes stopped being the oversupplied end of the industry. Every high performance computing chip ships alongside a large count of power management, control, sensing and power devices, and as AI server rack power and voltage rise, both the unit count and the specification go up with them. Economic Daily News reports that 8 inch and 12 inch mature capacity has moved from oversupply to tight, and that AI infrastructure demand is driving the tightness, with no consumer restock behind it.

TSMC (2330 TT) is the second cause. As it concentrates resources on leading edge, it is stepping back from parts of its mature node business, and the displaced orders are landing at UMC, Powerchip and Vanguard International (5347 TT). Vanguard is described as the first in line for that overflow given how closely its power management, display driver and automotive portfolio overlaps TSMC's.

UMC guides this quarter's wafer shipments up a high single digit percentage sequentially with utilization above 90% and gross margin in the mid 30s, and says it will hold price and margin discipline rather than chase share. Powerchip is working both a memory and a logic price cycle at once, with niche DRAM quotes recovering while AI server power management orders build; its August revenue of NT$7.01bn was a near 50 month high.

Linked stocks: 2303 TT, 6770 TT, 5347 TT, 2330 TT

Intel joins TSMC in courting AUO's glass lines

Intel (INTC US) is reported to be in talks with AUO (2409 TT) on Micro LED substrate based advanced packaging for co-packaged optics, which puts optical components inside the chip package, and for high density compute. Intel declined to comment. The same panel maker was already described this month as a leading candidate to partner TSMC (2330 TT) on panel level packaging.

What makes AUO the target is glass. Intel holds a US patent titled "IC Package with Micro LEDs" that embeds a semiconductor die partly inside a glass substrate, runs a through glass via to power Micro LEDs from within the package, and uses them for on package status display and in situ optical test. Industry sources say AUO's work across Micro LED, glass substrate, redistribution layer and optical interconnect overlaps that route closely enough that Intel approached it directly.

AUO's own position has changed fast. Chairman Paul Peng spent years saying the company did not work on advanced packaging; at the 2Q call he disclosed that the board had approved NT$8.64bn of capital expenditure that includes pilot lines for through glass via, redistribution layer and glass core substrates. He credits roughly 30 years of glass process experience and will not name partners. Separately, the market says TSMC has looked at buying AUO's L7 and L5C fabs in the Central Taiwan Science Park for packaging capacity; neither company comments.

The read for the display sector is that large area glass handling has turned into a semiconductor capability that the display makers happen to own. Our 14 September edition carried Corning leading Innolux, AUO and G-Tech Optoelectronics toward panel level packaging; a week later two chipmakers are competing for the same lines.

Linked stocks: 2409 TT, INTC US, 2330 TT, 3481 TT

CXMT claims 11.95nm memory without the newest tools

ChangXin Memory Technologies, China's largest DRAM maker, said on 20 September that it has moved its fifth generation platform, G5, into mass production. The company says G5 yields at least 50% more chips per wafer than the prior generation while improving energy efficiency and cost.

The number that matters is 11.95nm. Samsung Electronics (005930 KS) and SK Hynix (000660 KS) run 10nm class DRAM, and CXMT says it has reached the 11.95nm threshold using quadruple patterning, which exposes the wafer four times with older lithography rather than once with an extreme ultraviolet machine it cannot buy. On that basis it describes G5 as close to the most advanced memory platform in volume production anywhere.

CXMT also showed two G5 based products already in mass production, both 24Gb LPDDR5X parts for mobile devices, each carrying 50% more capacity than the equivalent previous generation part. It positioned them for mid range and high end smartphones and portable consumer electronics.

Taken with the Acer signal above, the two form one argument. Acer's chief executive named cheap Chinese memory as the thing that breaks the shortage; CXMT spent Sunday presenting its newest platform as a genuine manufacturing advance, staking its claim on capability as much as price. Our 14 September edition put CXMT's 2Q26 operating margin near 82%, ahead of the three largest memory makers, so the capital to keep iterating is already there.

Linked stocks: 000660 KS, 005930 KS, 2344 TT, MU US

BizLink goes wide and slow on optical links

BizLink Holding (3665 TT) announced an ecosystem partnership with ams OSRAM to develop optical interconnect for AI scale-up systems, and the architecture runs against where the optical industry has been heading. Instead of forcing more data through a few complex, power hungry high speed lanes, the design spreads it across a large number of parallel lanes running at low to medium rates.

BizLink calls the approach wide and slow. It claims longer reach, very low latency and lower power than the high speed route, at better cost for the performance delivered, and it targets the specific problem that scale-up fabrics have to solve power, latency, density and reliability at the same time.

The two companies are showing the system at ECOC 2026 in Spain from 21 to 23 September, with the public debut of a connectorized multi-core fiber solution. The demonstration uses an 850nm two dimensional addressable micro vertical cavity surface emitting laser array from ams OSRAM, paired with BizLink's fiber to fiber connector and optical packaging. BizLink's contribution is fiber array assembly, optical packaging, optical test and volume manufacturing, which is the part of co-packaged optics Taiwan actually owns.

Linked stocks: 3665 TT, 2330 TT, 2409 TT, 4958 TT

Microsoft says power and space limit Taiwan compute

Microsoft (MSFT US) Taiwan general manager Bian Zhixiang said at DevDays Asia in Taipei that AI compute demand will exceed supply for the next two to three years, and that the shortage is not only a graphics processor or central processor problem. It also covers electricity supply and the physical space to land new racks, which means building new sites and reconfiguring existing ones at the same time.

Microsoft is answering that in Taiwan directly. Bian said the local data center footprint is expanding from two sites to four about to open, with services offered rising from more than 70 at the start to more than 200. He described Taiwan as a Hero Site in Microsoft's global architecture, running a three plus one configuration, with customers concentrated in regulated and data sovereignty sectors including government, healthcare and finance.

On Microsoft's own silicon, Bian said design, capacity and planned deployment are all going well, and gave the reason plainly: Copilot and Microsoft 365 run enormous volumes of front end inference whose behavior is predictable and controllable, which is what makes an application specific chip cheaper per unit of compute than a merchant processor. He also said Taiwan's share of the global compute build is not being diluted by other regions in the near term.

Linked stocks: MSFT US, 2330 TT, 2382 TT, 2317 TT

Zhen Ding's substrate unit builds four Shenzhen plants

Leading Interconnect Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Zhen Ding Technology (4958 TT), broke ground on an AI advanced packaging substrate project in Bao'an, Shenzhen. Total investment is expected to reach at least RMB12bn, about US$1.79bn, and the site is planned as four factories for high end research, manufacturing and volume delivery.

It is a direct answer to the shortage this Blade quantified two days ago. Our 19 September edition carried Goldman Sachs putting the high end chip substrate shortfall at 14% in 2H26, 34% in 2027 and 51% in 2028, and the groundbreaking lands the same week Goldman flagged the Ajinomoto build-up film substrate gap widening across the next two years. Substrate capacity takes years to qualify, so a plant starting now is timed to the back half of that shortfall, well after the near-term gap.

Linked stocks: 4958 TT, 3037 TT, 8046 TT, 4062 JT

先聲 First Word: Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources

Samsung picks TSMC's silicon photonics test partners

Samsung Electronics is reported to be accelerating its silicon photonics build by selecting the same test partners TSMC uses, FormFactor and Taiwan's MPI Corporation, to run photonic integrated circuit wafer test on probers already certified for co-packaged optics, with a target of finishing inside 2026. Samsung is building its own test capability alongside, but routing through certified prober capacity is the fastest way into a queue that TSMC largely defined. (21 Sep 2026) Source: 【動物農莊】搭台積電認證便車　三星矽光子測試夥伴也選「這2家」

The Philippines puts TSMC and Foxconn on its wish list

Bases Conversion and Development Authority president Joshua Bingcang said one Taiwanese company has already taken about 30 hectares at New Clark City with 60 more reserved, first phase investment of US$1.0bn to US$1.5bn and expected annual exports of US$1.0bn to US$1.2bn, with construction starting in October. He named TSMC and Foxconn as the companies the agency intends to invite once the site's ecosystem is complete, and said three more advanced manufacturing deals are in talks. (21 Sep 2026) Source: 菲律賓打造先進製造基地 盼招攬台積電與鴻海

Innolux automotive revenue passes television

Innolux (3481 TT) took automotive to 39% of 2Q26 revenue through its CarUX unit after consolidating Pioneer at the end of 2025, overtaking television as its largest application, while fan-out panel level packaging chip-first monthly shipments rose from about 4m units at launch in 2Q25 to about 40m in 2026, mostly for low earth orbit satellites. The higher value redistribution layer and through glass via lines are still in customer qualification and development, with management targeting commercialization within two years. (21 Sep 2026) Source: 群創(3481)車用占比衝近4成，FOPLP出貨暴增！為何獲利還得看面板臉色？