Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), Advanced Micro Devices Inc and other companies have seen more than US$200 million in sales last year for computing components used to create bitcoins, Wedbush Securities Inc said.
The virtual currency, which exists as software, is created by solving complex tasks embedded in the program through a process called mining.
Bitcoins currently trade for about US$875 each on the Mt.Gox exchange, up from about US$13 one year ago.
As their value surged, digital prospectors have rushed to create more of the digital money, boosting the market for high-powered machines, some of which cost more than US$20,000 a piece. TSMC, AMD and GlobalFoundries make many of the chips in these machines, according to Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush in Los Angeles.
“Due to the growth of the bitcoin network, mining machines now require powerful application-specific integrated circuits [ASIC] that are designed specifically to mine bitcoins,” Luria said in a report. “We believe the majority of these ASIC chips are fabricated at SMC and GlobalFoundries.”
The report also flagged some potential beneficiaries of the digital boom, such as EBay Inc’s PayPal unit and International Business Machines Corp.
PayPal could make bitcoin one of its payment options, along with credit cards, this year, and benefit from an influx of millions of new users, Luria said in an interview.
IBM could provide software and hardware powering bitcoin and other new digital currencies, he said.
As more consumers adopt bitcoin and other digital currencies for purchases and money transfers, that could adversely impact established financial companies such as Western Union Co, Luria said.
“It’s incredibly easy now to send money with bitcoin from one country to another,” Luria said in an interview.
“But now you need to know how to do it. I expect a flurry of money transmitters to emerge in the next one to three years, and they’ll be able to do this for everybody at a fraction of the cost of Western Union and others,” Luria added.
Jason Gorss, a spokesman for GlobalFoundries, said the manufacturer is working with several companies that design chips for bitcoin mining, such as Butterfly Labs Inc.
“We’re watching digital currencies like bitcoin closely,” Jennifer Hakes, a spokeswoman for PayPal, wrote in an e-mail.
“Many of our consumers prefer cash,” Andrew Silver, a spokesman for Western Union, wrote in an e-mail. “We will continue to track the use of virtual currency in the market, and expect that it should comply with the same regulations and oversight that the rest of the financial services industry must adhere to, to ensure that consumers are protected.”
Bitcoins are not controlled by any country or banking authority, so fees on using the currency to make purchases or transfer money can be much lower. Bitcoins are being used to pay for everything from Gummi bears to smartphones on the Internet.
Retailer Overstock.com Inc said recently it is to begin accepting Bitcoins starting in the middle of the year.
“We think there’s an underserved part of the market that wants to use bitcoins and can’t,” Overstock chief executive officer Patrick Byrne said in an interview last month.
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
RSS