Semicon Series 2 | Nvidia’s $3.5 Billion Bet: Why MediaTek Built a New Team With Intel and Apple Veterans

The biggest news this week, of course, was Apple’s annual launch event. John Ternus, who formally took over as Apple’s third CEO last week, unveiled the company’s first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo. It marks Apple’s most significant product change in nearly a decade.

So far, reactions have been mixed.

First, it is widely regarded as the most polished foldable phone on the market. Apple has managed to make the biggest technical drawback of foldable devices—the crease down the middle of the display—almost imperceptible through a clever combination of hardware and software.

The price, of course, is steep. The entry-level model starts at US$1,999, nearly 50% more expensive than Apple’s flagship phone.

Its biggest weakness is the camera. It offers only 2x zoom, which is difficult to accept for longtime users like us who have grown accustomed to using high-powered zoom for quick shots.

Yet all of this nitpicking may ultimately be irrelevant.

Consider a few key numbers:

1. Foldable phones accounted for just 1.6% of the global smartphone market in 2025.
2. Half of them were sold in China.
3. Huawei held 70% of China’s foldable-phone market.

According to Bloomberg, it was during a trip to Asia in 2020 that Tim Cook saw the popularity of foldable phones from Huawei and Samsung and became determined to develop Apple’s own foldable device.

Now, the Duo’s first mission is naturally to win market share from homegrown heavyweight Huawei in the strategically important Chinese market.

Huawei also launched its new Mate XT2 tri-fold phone on Monday this week. The entire lineup is powered by the Kirin 9050 Pro, marking the first time in six years, since Huawei was hit by U.S. export restrictions, that the company has introduced an all-new Kirin chip at a flagship product launch.

It is the first smartphone chip based on the “Tao’s Law” technology framework. In other words, with further scaling through EUV no longer possible, Huawei is using hybrid bonding to vertically stack 7-nanometer logic chips.

Huawei claims that transistor density per unit area has increased by 55% from the previous generation, while performance has improved by 42%.

A foreign institutional analyst told me that the 9050 Pro has indeed delivered the kind of performance improvement expected from a generational upgrade. “Now it comes down to whether they can ramp up volume.”

With the Duo powered by a chip manufactured on TSMC’s 2-nanometer process going head-to-head in China with a “Tao’s Law” foldable, the next few months should be fascinating to watch.

Back to this week’s newsletter.

As previewed last week, this is the second installment of the SEMICON Taiwan 2026 series: the “MediaTek edition.”

We will start with presentations by two senior MediaTek executives making their first appearances at the event, as well as their respective backgrounds at Intel and Apple, to get a glimpse of the major organizational changes MediaTek is making to take on the AI era.

Please read this week’s newsletter.