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.
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
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day