AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the nation’s No. 2 LCD panel maker, said its solar cell manufacturing arm inaugurated a new plant yesterday with an ultimate annual capacity of 1.4 gigawatt high-efficiency solar cells.
In May, the Hsinchu-based panel maker unveiled its plan to form a US$700 million solar cell venture with SunPower Corp of Malaysia, completing the last piece of AUO’s involvement in the solar industry supply chain, after it invested in solar wafer manufacturing and solar system installation businesses.
The AUO-SunPower joint venture has produced 5 megawatts of solar cells since October, the companies said in a joint statement and the conversion rate reached 22.5 percent.
AUO expects to complete the construction of 18 production lines at the new solar cell plant by 2013. No information about the amount of the investment was disclosed.
“Malaysia’s investment in the AUO-SunPower joint venture — an excellent talent pool and a positive business investment climate — has given us the opportunity to significantly expand solar cell production that will meet the demand for solar worldwide, which has grown nearly eight-fold over the past four years. We appreciate our partnership with the Malaysian government,” SunPower chief executive Tom Werner said in a statement.
Next year, installation of solar panels is expected to grow 14 percent to 15.43 gigawatts from 13.53 gigawatts this year, Taipei-based researcher TrendForce Technology Corp (集邦科技) said.
However, supply is expected to grow beyond demand by between 20 gigawatts and 25 gigawatts, increasing concern of a supply glut, TrendForce said in a report released on Tuesday.
Separately, AUO said that as of the end of last month, it had 7,400 patents registered globally, which has given the company an upper hand in winning patent lawsuits. The company said that as of the end of last month, it had filed 15,000 patent applications.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
INDUSTRY LEADER: INDUSTRY LEADER: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
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