Memorychip maker Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電) is to break ground today on a NT$335 billion (US$10.92 billion) fab in a rare capacity expansion, marking the Southern Taiwan Science Park’s (南部科學工業園) biggest-ever investment.
The investment is also the largest made by Winbond since 2004, as the Hsinchu-based firm is cautious about boosting capacity due to the industry’s vulnerability to supply-demand dynamics.
“The investment is the largest scale in the history of the park in Kaohsiung’s Lujhu District (路竹), surpassing all capital that has been invested over the past 15 years,” the Kaohsiung Economic Development Bureau said in a statement on Monday.
The 12-inch fab is slated to start producing DRAM and flash memory chips after construction finishes in 2020, the statement said, adding that it would create at least 2,500 jobs.
Winbond chose Taiwan over Singapore for the fab, as the city government and the Ministry of Science and Technology last year located a piece of land and fast-tracked approval, Acting Kaohsiung Mayor Hsu Li-ming (許立明) said in the statement.
Prior to Winbond’s addition, the park had attracted investment totaling NT$37.5 billion, Hsu said.
Winbond’s board of directors in August approved an initial investment of NT$20.37 billion in the fab to support the firm’s long-term growth, the company said, adding that installed capacity is to be 285,000 per month.
Winbond said its revenue growth in the first half of this year was limited by inadequate capacity, as its factory utilization rate is close to 100 percent and would continue to run at full capacity in the second half.
Semiconductor firms in Kaohsiung last year generated NT$500 billion in production value, accounting for 20 percent of the nation’s total semiconductor production value, Hsu said, citing unspecified statistics.
The contribution from Kaohsiung should increase as a growing number of integrated circuit component suppliers, foundry companies and chip testing and packaging companies have requested land to build fabs in the municipality, he said.
Winbond shares rallied 1.7 percent to NT$14.95 yesterday in Taipei trading.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
RSS