PRE-MARKET TAIWAN AND SINGAPORE STOCKS NEWS: ASE Technology Holding (3711 TT) raised its annual capex budget for the third time to USD 11.5bln (prev. USD 10.5bln)

ASE Technology Holding (3711 TT) - Co. raised its annual capex budget for the third time to USD 11.5bln (prev. USD 10.5bln), driven by expectations that customer demand will continue to outpace capacity next year, particularly for its leading-edge advanced packaging technologies used in AI chips. (Taipei Times)

Tech - Nasdaq underperformed during US trade following Alphabet’s earnings, while futures saw further pressure after hours due to weak reports from Amazon and Intel.

Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA) supports the government's efforts to assess restarting nuclear power plants, citing the need for a stable and sufficient electricity supply to support the semiconductor industry. (Taipei Times)

Taiwan's economy remained in boom territory for a 10th consecutive month in September, supported by surging demand for AI hardware despite an increasingly high comparison base, according to the National Development Council (NDC). (Taipei Times)

Keppel (KEP SP) - Co. CEO sees essential services providing resilience and growth opportunities, with rising AI and energy demand expected to drive its next phase of expansion. (Straits Times)

ST Engineering (STE SP) - Co. secured SGD 5.6bln in new contracts during Q3 2026. (Straits Times)

Repeated in-year capex raises by an outsourced assembly and test house are a familiar late-cycle signature of capacity-constrained packaging demand, and the pattern in past upcycles has been that the third successive increase carries less incremental signal than the first two: by then the market has typically extrapolated the tightness. The channel that matters here is advanced packaging for AI accelerators, where OSAT capacity is the bottleneck complement to leading-edge foundry output, so sustained overbooking at ASE reads across to substrate, equipment and test peers rather than to the broader semis complex uniformly. The distinction worth drawing is between capacity-led spending, which presumes demand holds, and demand-led spending, which has historically been the version that gets cut first when orders soften. The accompanying items sit in the same thread: the industry association's nuclear stance reflects the power-supply constraint that has periodically capped Taiwanese fab expansion, and a long run of boom readings in the local activity gauge is the kind of backdrop in which capex revisions have tended to stay positive until they abruptly do not. The tell going forward is whether peers and the equipment suppliers confirm the same order trajectory, and whether future raises come with pricing commentary or merely volume. The US after-hours weakness in megacap tech reported alongside is the established read-across risk for the Taiwan session, though capex news of this kind has usually traded on its own merits within the OSAT names.