■ Economy
Chinese moguls buy 22 jets
Businessmen in eastern China have ordered 22 planes in a multimillion-dollar deal that more than triples the number of privately owned aircraft in China, state-run media said yesterday. The orders, worth 133 million yuan (US$16.7 million), were placed in the past week at an exhibition organized by a flying club in booming Zhejiang Province, Xinhua News Agency said. The planes included four Cessna jets, four seaplanes and four helicopters from seven companies from China, Hong Kong, the US and Slovenia. The most expensive was a Dassault business jet that cost 60 million yuan, Xu Weijie, chairman of the Yueqing Flying Club, was quoted as saying in the China Daily newspaper. Xu said the entrepreneurs paid little attention to price tags and were more concerned about how soon they could get their purchases up in the air.
■ Web telephony
Google sued over VoIP
A small New York technology firm said on Friday it was suing search titan Google for up to US$5 billion for patent violation in the Internet telephony software used in Google Talk. Jerry Weinberger, chief executive of Rates Technology Inc (RTI), said he was the inventor of software that allows telephone calls to be placed over the Internet. He said 120 companies, including Lucent, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo and Microsoft, have paid RTI to use the technology for "Voice over Internet Protocol" (VoIP) calls. RTI filed suit in a Long Island federal court against Google two months ago because the search engine was using the technology without authorization, Weinberger said. "They told us to go to hell," the RTI boss told reporters. "They are the most arrogant company in the world."
■ Steel
Bush rejects quotas on China
US President George W. Bush on Friday rejected a request to place quotas on steel pipe imported from China, saying the cost to American consumers would outweigh the benefit to domestic producers. US pipemakers and a labor group, which strongly condemned the president's decision, asked the Bush administration to impose the quotas on certain kinds of steel pipe used primarily in construction. They argued that a surge in imports from China was disrupting markets. The International Trade Commission sided with the companies, and recommended that the US president provide them with relief. But Bush rejected that, saying it was not in the best interest of the US economy. Any relief, he said, would probably be ineffective because steel imports from other countries would probably replace those curtailed from China.
■ Sugar
Thailand faces shortage
Thailand, the world's second-biggest exporter of sugar, is facing a "severe shortage" of the commodity and will crack down on hoarding and illegal exports to shore-up supplies, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday. The government will also fix domestic prices, the premier said in his weekly radio address. He said he has ordered an investigation into warehouses suspected of hoarding sugar meant for domestic consumption with the aim of selling overseas where prices are higher. Farmers and traders will have to accommodate lower prices, Thaksin said. Thailand experienced its worst drought for 40 years in the first half of last year and output may not recover until the 2006-2007 harvest in 12 months, the International Sugar Organization said on Nov. 7.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to