PRE-MARKET TAIWAN AND SINGAPORE STOCKS NEWS: TSMC (2330 TT) reportedly eyes further CoWoS price hikes of up to 20%

Foxconn (2317 TT) - Co. has launched an AI factory powered by an NVIDIA (NVDA) DGX supercomputing cluster. (Newswires)

TSMC (2330 TT) - Co. reportedly eyes further CoWoS price hikes of up to 20%. (CTEE)

Nasdaq outperformed during Wall St trade as tech rebounded from the recent AI-related sell-off and with Anthropic filing for an IPO.

CapitaLand Ascott Trust (CLAS SP) - Co. Q3 same-store RevPAU rose 4% Y/Y, excluding acquisitions, divestments and the closure of The Cavendish London for renovations, while profit remained relatively stable excluding the property, despite transitional effects from portfolio reconstitution. (Business Times)

Sembcorp Industries (SCI SP) and Keppel (KEP SP) could benefit from Singapore's plans to strengthen its energy infrastructure over the next five years, amid rising electricity demand and concerns over fuel security keeping the power market tight. (Straits Times)

CoWoS packaging is the binding constraint on advanced AI accelerator supply, and TSMC's pricing there has become the cleanest single tell on the economics of the AI buildout: when the foundry raises CoWoS rates, it signals that wafer-level capacity is scarce enough to be priced on value rather than cost, which compresses margins downstream for fabless customers such as NVIDIA and the broader accelerator chain, and supports the bull case for TSMC's own advanced-node and packaging revenue mix. Reported hikes of this size, taken together with the Foxconn NVIDIA DGX AI-factory item, point in the same direction as the overnight Nasdaq rebound: demand signal intact after the recent AI-related sell-off. The distinction that matters is where the hike lands: packaging and advanced-node pricing flows straight into TSMC's blended ASP and gross margin, whereas pass-through capacity for customers determines whether the move is margin-accretive for the foundry or merely inflationary for the ecosystem. Historical pattern in semis pricing cycles is that foundry price increases stick when utilization is high and alternative capacity is years away, which is precisely the position CoWoS has been in. Whether TSMC confirms the report, and how customers respond on order volumes versus acceptance, is the follow-on that separates a genuine repricing from trial-balloon reporting.