Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海), the world’s largest contract electronics maker, is scheduled to break ground on a cloud technology development center in southern Taiwan next month, a Ministry of Economic Affairs official said yesterday.
Huang Wen-guu (黃文谷), director of the ministry’s Export Processing Zone Administration, said the construction of the cloud technology base, which will be located in the Kaohsiung Software Technology Park, is expected to be completed in June 2015 and create 3,000 new jobs.
Earlier this month, Hon Hai held a job fair in Greater Kaohsiung where it hired several hundred software engineers especially for the software investment project.
Hon Hai confirmed the investment project, saying it will invest NT$1.9 billion (US$63 million) to construct two buildings in the software park, one to be a software development center and the other to be a cloud-based data center.
The company is one of many local electronics-related manufacturers which aim to tap the growing cloud technology business in an attempt to offset the impact from a down cycle in the hardware sector.
Greater Kaohsiung Deputy Mayor Lee Yung-te (李永得) said Hon Hai had previously planned to start building the center last year, but some regulatory barriers delayed the project.
Hon Hai is considering where to build a dormitory for the center’s future employees and the city government said the investment is expected to boost Greater Kaohsiung’s residential property development.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the