Investment targets on track
The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said investments from the private sector totaled NT$995.6 billion (US$32.99 billion) in the first 10 months of this year, 90.51 percent of its full-year target of NT$1.1 trillion.
New foreign investment hit US$8.85 billion in the January-to-October period, 98.36 percent of the ministry target of US$9 billion this year.
The ministry said it attracted NT$14.28 billion of investment from both domestic and foreign firms in the booming electric vehicle sector and related components during the first 10 months.
That amount already surpasses the ministry’s full-year target of NT$12 billion, it said.
Elpida sues Nanya Technology
Elpida Memory Inc said it has filed a patent lawsuit against Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) with the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court and the US International Trade Commission.
The Japanese chipmaker said in a statement yesterday that Nanya had violated its dynamic random access memory (DRAM) patents.
In September, Tokyo-based Elpida filed a complaint against Nanya Technology and its US unit in the Northern District Court of California, accusing the chipmaker of illegally using four of its patented technologies relating to DRAM manufacturing.
ITC delays S3 patent ruling
The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has delayed until Monday its final ruling on a complaint filed by HTC Corp (宏達電) subsidiary S3 Graphics Co against Apple Inc.
The ITC was originally scheduled to release a final ruling on the case on Tuesday, but in a notice posted on its Web site, the agency said it had decided to extend the target date for the completion of the investigation “on certain electronic devices with image processing systems, components thereof and associated software that infringe patents asserted by S3.”
S3 accused Apple in May last year of violating four patents owned by the company.
The ITC handed down a preliminary ruling in the case on July 26, in which it found that Apple’s Mac OS X system had infringed on two of S3’s texture compression patents, but that the iPhone and iPad had not.
HP to launch its first ultrabook
Hewlett-Packard Co, which last month abandoned a proposal to spin off its PC unit, plans to introduce its first lightweight ultrabook laptop to compete with Apple Inc’s MacBook Air.
The HP Folio laptop has a 13.3-inch screen and weighs 1.5kg. The PC will go on sale on Dec. 7 priced at US$900, according to a statement.
It is Hewlett-Packard’s first entry into the ultrabook category of laptops created by chipmaker Intel Corp. The Folio features a metal case, 4 gigabytes of memory, a solid-state hard drive and Intel’s Core i5 chip, HP said in the statement.
The company said the Folio’s battery can run as long as nine hours without recharging.
Euro woes weaken NT dollar
The New Taiwan dollar fell against its US counterpart yesterday, declining NT$0.020 to close at NT$30.230, a reflection of the weakness of the currencies in the Asia-Pacific region because of concerns over rising borrowing costs in debt-ridden Italy, dealers said.
The fears over the debt problems in the eurozone escalated after 10-year Italian government bond yields jumped above 7 percent again overnight, which prompted traders to forecast that the European country might need a bailout, dealers said.
Turnover totaled US$674 billion during the trading session.
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