Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) said it has no plans to provide foundry services for Chinese clients amid growing speculation that China would work with Taiwan to build its own DRAM capacity.
As China has clearly shown its determination to strengthen its role in the worldwide semiconductor industry by establishing a 120 billion yuan (US$18.4 billion) state fund to build a full semiconductor supply chain in China, investors are closely monitoring Beijing’s moves.
“We hope to participate in the [Chinese] market. China is an important market for us, but we only play the role of [DRAM] supplier. Nothing more,” Nanya president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told reporters on Tuesday.
On top of that, Nanya does not plan to participate in any mergers or acquisitions initiated by Chinese companies, Lee said.
As Beijing is aggressively seeking partners to build its chip capacity to reduce its reliance on imports, investors are concerned whether China will pose a threat or an opportunity to Nanya.
The Nikkei recently reported that former Elpida Memory Inc president Yukio Nakamoto has established a new company, Sino King Technology Ltd, in Hefei, China, to develop next-generation memory chips employing Japanese and Taiwanese technology.
Sino King plans to design low-power DRAM chips used for Internet of Things applications, with mass production set to start in the second half of next year at the earliest, the report said.
Earlier this month, US IC designer Integrated Silicon Solution Inc announced that it would sell all of its shares to a Chinese consortium of investors led by Summitview Capital (武岳峰資本) for about US$640 million.
“The impact [to Nanya] will be very minor,” as Integrated Silicon has no DRAM manufacturing experience or intellectual property, which is crucial to produce DRAM chips, Lee said.
Separately, Nanya’s board yesterday agreed to distribute employee bonuses totaling NT$670 million (US$20.3 million) and pay a cash dividend of NT$2.8 per common share based on last year’s net profit of NT$17.13 billion, or NT$7.07 per share.
The payout represents a dividend yield of 6.75 percent, compared with Nanya’s closing price of NT$41.50 yesterday.
The company also said it expects to book NT$19.94 billion in a one-time asset gain by selling all of its shares of Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技) to Micron Technology Inc in exchange for a stake in the US company. The transaction is expected to be completed in the middle of this year.
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
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
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