The government does not plan to allow Chinese investors to acquire stakes in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday.
“We won’t allow it,” MAC Chairwoman Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) said at a press briefing in Taipei.
The telecommunications industry is not among the sectors being discussed for addition to the list of approved targets for Chinese investment, Lai said.
“This is a very important industry for Taiwan,” she said.
The government will likely let Chinese invest in 65 industries in its first phase of opening up, including automobiles, textiles, rubber and retailing, with detailed rules probably coming at the end of the month, Minister of Economic Affairs Yiin Chii-ming (尹啟銘) said on Tuesday last week.
Far EasTone Telecommunications Ltd (遠傳電信), the nation’s third-largest phone company, said last month that it would sell a 12 percent stake to Beijing-based China Mobile Ltd (中國移動通信), but the investment is currently prohibited by law.
“By doing it in this way, it will not force the government to open up,” Lai said.
She said she did not know if or when the sector could be discussed for loosening restrictions.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
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