AI Weekly Malaysia

SMIC posted its first $3B quarter with revenue up 36.1% YoY and net profit nearly tripling to $479.2M, running at 93.7% utilization. Co-CEO Zhao Haijun announced wafer price hikes for Q3, citing a gap between SMIC's prices and industry-leading foundry prices, as US export controls cut Chinese AI data center builders off from TSMC and Samsung at the leading edge.

Why: The US-China semiconductor bifurcation is creating a captive market where SMIC can raise prices despite being a generation behind TSMC. For builders in SEA, this signals that Chinese AI infrastructure will increasingly run on SMIC-fabricated chips with different performance and cost profiles than Western equivalents — relevant if you deploy models or sell into China-adjacent markets, and a reminder that Malaysia's own semiconductor investments sit squarely in the contested middle of this supply chain split.

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