Samsung Electronics Co, the first company scheduled to sell high-definition DVD players based on Sony Corp's technology, delayed the introduction of its Blu-ray machine, widening Toshiba Corp's head start in home entertainment's biggest format war in two decades.
Samsung postponed the debut of the player in the US by a month until June, said Ken Noh, a spokesman for the South Korea-based company, confirming a Reuters report. Noh said he couldn't immediately verify other details of the report, which said the player's debut was delayed until June 25 from May 23 because the product needs further testing.
The delay is the latest setback for Sony, which pushed back the introduction of its PlayStation 3 game console because of Blu-ray, in its bid to avoid losing the battle to set the standard format for home entertainment, as it did with Betamax against Video Home System tapes during the 1980s.
Toshiba, which is promoting the rival HD DVD format, began selling players based on its technology last week in Japan and plans to introduce it in the US this month. The company has the support of Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software maker, and Intel Corp, the biggest chipmaker.
LG Electronics Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co are among companies that back both Toshiba and Sony. Samsung supports Sony.
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
RSS