British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is to announce £75 million (US$99.1 million) in funding for artificial intelligence (AI) and plans to put driverless cars on UK roads by 2021 in his autumn budget speech on Wednesday.
Hammond is to announce regulatory changes to allow Britain’s driverless car industry, which the government estimates could be worth £28 billion by 2035, to get cars on the road within as little as three years, according to extracts of the budget released by the British Exchequer yesterday.
Hammond, who is under pressure to deliver an eye-catching budget after Brexit spats with Cabinet colleagues, will also announce a £400 million fund for companies hoping to roll out electric-car charging points across the country.
People hoping to buy a battery-electric vehicle will also be able to access funding as Britain attempts to move toward zero-emission transportation.
With a focus on tech industries, the government is also planning to spend £75 million supporting companies that develop AI and £160 million in developing 5G technology, which it believes will be necessary for the mass rollout of driverless cars.
However, Hammond is likely to be judged more on his social spending policies, particularly on his housing policy, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, which killed 71 people.
The government is to build 300,000 new homes a year — an increase on the 217,000 built in the last fiscal year — through “billions of pounds” of investment and rules that would make it easier for construction companies to build on sites that already have planning approval, Hammond told the Sunday Times.
In a preview of Wednesday’s budget, Hammond vowed to do “whatever it takes” to get homes built and said he would launch an investigation into builders who hoard land and local authorities who block developments.
Since the spring budget, the UK’s growth outlook has not improved and interest rates rose for the first time in a decade — bad news for mortgage holders. The potential shocks caused by Brexit and a reassessment of productivity data are constraining Hammond’s room for giveaways.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by