INTERNET
Domain site GoDaddy sold
The parent company of www.GoDaddy.com, a top registrar of Internet domain names, has been sold to a group of private investment firms for US$2.25 billion, a person familiar with the transaction told reporters. Go Daddy Group Inc’s sale to KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures comes as the company expects to top US$1.1 billion in revenue this year because expanding Internet use has fueled the creation of more Web sites and the “domains” needed to help find them. Go Daddy announced the sale late on Friday. A fact sheet accompanying the release indicated that Go Daddy’s revenue has grown by more than 20 percent in each of the past several years.
PATENTS
Samsung streamlines suits
Samsung Electronics Co dropped a patent--infringement suit against Apple Inc, filed at a US federal court in April in response to allegations its Galaxy products copied the iPhone and iPad. Samsung Electronics dropped the suit on Thursday “to streamline the legal proceedings,” Nam Ki Yung, a spokesman for the South Korea-based company, said yesterday in a telephone interview. Samsung will continue to defend its patent rights through a counter-claim in an earlier suit Apple filed at the same court in San Jose, California, he said.
AVIATION
Tiger Air fleet grounded
An air safety watchdog yesterday grounded all Australian domestic flights of a Tiger Airways subsidiary for the next week, saying the budget airline twice flew under the minimum allowed altitude. About 35,000 passengers are affected and more could follow if the airline fails to quickly address regulators’ concerns. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority spokesman Peter Gibson said that Tiger was the first national carrier in Australia to have its entire fleet grounded.
SPAIN
Foreclosure laws changed
Spain’s government approved measures on Friday to help the soaring number of home-owners, many jobless, who cannot pay their mortgages. The government has since mid-May faced demonstrations across the country from “indignant” protesters decrying the state of the economy and corruption. Among their demands are changes to Spain’s strict mortgage foreclosure laws. Under Spanish law, banks have the right to auction houses in a foreclosure. If no buyers appear, the bank can take ownership of the house for 50 percent of its value. Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said this percentage would be raised to 60 percent, which will leave a defaulter with a smaller debt to pay off. The government will also raise the amount of a borrower’s monthly income that can not be seized by a bank in case of default on a home loan to 961 euros (US$1,390) from 641 euros, Rubalcaba said.
AGRICULTURE
US farmers win payout
German conglomerate Bayer CropScience agreed on Friday to pay up to US$750 million to settle several lawsuits with US farmers who claimed a strain of the company’s unapproved genetically modified rice contaminated the food supply and hurt their crop prices. The settlement reached on Friday will extend to all US farmers who planted long-grain rice between 2006 and last year. Don Downing, a St Louis-based attorney, who has represented farmers in the case since 2006, said the agreement was likely the largest settlement in the history of genetically altered crops.
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