Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) on Friday announced that it plans to open an office in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that would bring at least 200 high-tech jobs, a chance for the company to spread benefits and goodwill more widely amid doubts that the company’s massive southeastern Wisconsin campus would boost the economy statewide.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has been promising for months that the display screen manufacturing campus Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) in Taiwan, plans to build in Mount Pleasant in Racine County will transform Wisconsin’s economy.
Last year, he signed a bill that provides up to US$4.5 billion in state incentives for the project.
Critics have questioned how much impact the company will have on Wisconsin’s economy as a whole.
Sixty-one percent of respondents to a Marquette University Law School statewide poll released last week said they did not think the company would directly benefit businesses where they live.
The company on Friday announced that it has reached an agreement to purchase a six-story, 6,968m2 building in downtown Green Bay and use it as a so-called “innovation center.”
The center is to work with start-ups and other businesses to develop applications for Foxconn screens, the company and Walker’s office said.
“This investment marks another commitment by Foxconn to the state of Wisconsin and will ensure Foxconn’s contributions go well beyond the [Mount Pleasant campus] and our North American headquarters in the city of Milwaukee,” Foxconn chief executive officer Terry Gou (郭台銘) said in the announcement.
Foxconn officials on June 15 announced that they had purchased a downtown Milwaukee building to house their North American headquarters and an innovation center.
The Green Bay center could translate to a major boost for Walker with northeastern Wisconsin voters. The region trends conservative and the governor presumably will need to do well there to help offset Democratic votes in Madison and Milwaukee.
“Foxconn’s decision to expand ... to northeastern Wisconsin is yet another example of the ‘Foxconn bonus’ that goes above and beyond the company’s historic investment in Racine County,” Walker said in a news release on Friday. “Whether it is the construction-related jobs that are being created right now throughout the state or key investments such as this, Foxconn is already having a positive impact on every region of our great state.”
Foxconn officials said in the announcement they plan to close on the Green Bay property and open the innovation center later this year.
The announcement did not elaborate or disclose terms of the purchase agreement.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS