DeepSeek’s Planned ¥50 Billion Funding Round Shakes the Industry; State-Backed Fund Leads Cross-Sector Investment
· **Dual-Engine Drive (Hardware & Software):** DeepSeek, a domestic AI large-model unicorn, plans to raise ¥50 billion. A state-backed "Big Fund" is leading the investment—marking its first cross-sector move into a pure-play algorithmic large-model company—pushing the firm's valuation to $45 billion.
· **Collective Price Hikes for Display Drivers:** In early May, Chipone, Lipu-Chip, and Fuman Micro issued price adjustment notices. Citing surging upstream wafer raw material costs, increased packaging and testing fees, and capacity constraints caused by AI demand, they announced a uniform price increase of over 30% across their entire LED display driver product lines.
· **Simultaneous Price Surge in Materials:** Silicon wafer giant Shin-Etsu Chemical raised prices for all global silicon products by over 10% starting May 1st. Meanwhile, the price of tungsten powder—a critical raw material—has skyrocketed six- to seven-fold over the past year due to export controls.
The Tug-of-War Between Technology and Supply Chain: The Rise of Optical Interconnects and Novel Advanced Packaging
· **Optical Interconnects Replacing Copper Cables:** As AI clusters scale to the "10,000-GPU" level, copper cables are hitting physical limits regarding bandwidth and transmission distance. Optical interconnect technologies (such as 1.6T optical modules and silicon lens components) are rapidly emerging; the core of global AI chip competition is shifting from mere raw computing power accumulation to a system-level contest balancing computing power, interconnects, and energy efficiency.
· **Industry Giants Team Up to Break TSMC’s Bottleneck:** Constrained by TSMC’s CoWoS packaging capacity limits, memory giant SK Hynix is deepening its collaboration with Intel. They are evaluating the use of Intel’s EMIB 2.5D packaging technology to connect HBM memory chips to logic chips, aiming to reshape the AI packaging supply chain.
