ELECTRONICS
Merck opens IC center
Germany’s Merck KGaA on Friday founded its first Integrated Circuit (IC) Materials Application Development Center in Asia in Kaohsiung. IC materials division senior vice president Rico Wiedenbruch said at the opening ceremony that the center aims to serve as the first responder to problems related to semiconductors and electronic wafers in Taiwan and Asia. The center, which was a NT$100 million (US$3.33 million) investment, provides both front and back-end applications, he said.
GAMES
XPEC to be delisted
The troubled game developer XPEC Entertainment Inc (樂陞科技) is to be delisted from the over-the-counter bourse on Oct. 19, as the market regulator decides to better protect investors’ interests, the Taipei Exchange said on Friday. The move came after XPEC failed to hold an extraordinary general meeting on Friday to elect a new board of directors for the second time in the past thee months and still could not implement workable measures to improve its financial condition, the exchange said.
ELECTRONICS
Hon Hai sales up 1.31%
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) on Friday said that consolidated sales reached NT$316.79 billion last month, up 1.31 percent from a year earlier. The company said that its computing devices scored the strongest growth in revenue, reflecting seasonal back-to-school buying. The devices were followed by communications and consumer electronics gadgets. In the first eight months of this year, cumulative sales totaled NT$2.53 trillion, up 1.6 percent year-on-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