China Steel Corp (CSC, 中鋼) said yesterday that a new furnace at its subsidiary, Dragon Steel Corp (中龍鋼鐵), would become operational today, pushing CSC’s annual steel production up to 20 million tonnes a year.
“The new furnace is the final step in our five-year plan initiated in 2008, which aimed to invest NT$200 billion (US$6.7 billion) and increase our annual capacity to 20 million tonnes,” China Steel vice president Steve Lee (李慶超) said by telephone yesterday.
According to the World Steel Association, 14 steel companies around the world in 2011 had the capacity to produce 20 million tonnes of crude steel a year.
The furnace that will begin operating today can produce 2.5 million tonnes of hot-rolled sheets and coils, and these products would serve as raw materials for a plant in Vietnam, which is funded by CSC and Japan-based Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, Lee said.
CSC has invested US$1.15 billion in the Vietnam plant, Lee said.
It is set to become operational in June and will target customers in the auto industry, as well as home appliance providers in South East Asia, Lee added.
The furnace will be Dragon Steel’s second, and the sixth furnace under CSC’s control.
Dragon Steel started operation of its first furnace in February 2010, while CSC began operation of its four furnaces between 1971 and 1997.
Steel companies usually have at least two furnaces to maintain production levels as every furnace requires six months of maintenance after operating for 10 years, Lee said.
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