Plug and Play has closed a 6 billion Japanese yen fund — approximately US$40 million — making it one of the largest first-time seed funds ever raised in Japan, the firm announced on the first day of the Plug and Play May Summit in Sunnyvale.
Saeed Amidi, founder and CEO of Plug and Play, opened the first day of the Plug and Play May Summit in Sunnyvale with a characteristically freewheeling address that wove together billion-dollar announcements, geopolitical asides and a running joke about his wife's online shopping habits — but beneath the humor was a substantive strategic pivot.
At the Plug and Play Silicon Valley May Summit 2026, industry leaders from Sony, Nvidia, and USC gathered to discuss the next phase of the AI revolution during the opening panel discussion, "AI Beyond the Hype: Who Actually Wins the Next Decade?" The consensus was clear: while infrastructure giants laid the groundwork, the next wave of massive disruption will occur in vertical applications.
Sarthak Vaish, associate partner at McKinsey & Company, delivered a pointed reality check at the 5th Mobis Mobility Day in Sunnyvale: the hardware for humanoid robots is ready, but the organizations meant to deploy them are not.
Japanese electronic components manufacturer TDK will make its largest-ever capital investment in fiscal 2026, running from April 2026 to March 2027, to address surging demand related to artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on batteries, hard disk drive (HDD) components, and multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC).
Lens Technology is seeking control of Ju Teng International Holdings in a deal that could cost as much as US$337 million, expanding the Chinese precision manufacturing supplier's reach in notebook casings and hardware components as electronics suppliers position for a new wave of AI-enabled devices.
Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has awarded subsidies to three research and development projects, approving NT$100 million (US$3.16 million) for Solomon's humanoid robot Vision-Language-Action technology on May 18. The grants were approved at the sixth final review meeting of the ministry's A+ Enterprise Innovation R&D Tempering Program, which helps companies share R&D costs and risks through expert review and direct funding.
Analog Devices Inc. is in advanced talks to acquire Empower Semiconductor for about US$1.5 billion in cash, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A formal announcement could come as soon as Tuesday. The deal has not been finalized and could still fall through.
Nvidia's fanless Vera Rubin AI server racks, slated for mass production in the second half of 2026, are expected to accelerate global adoption of liquid cooling across server components, creating demand beyond GPUs for CPUs, memory, network cards, and switches, and reshaping thermal management supply chains worldwide and vendor economics.
Chinese officials have renewed calls to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) more deeply into manufacturing as Beijing seeks to modernize traditional industries, strengthen industrial competitiveness, and cultivate new growth drivers.
China is accelerating plans for a national computing power network as artificial intelligence (AI) token usage surges, casting AI compute as part of the country's next layer of public infrastructure.
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