DRAM prices could drop slightly this quarter because of sluggish demand and increasing supply from SK Hynix Inc, ending a months-long price uptick due to tight supply, local market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report yesterday.
DRAM chipmakers again agreed to hold DRAM contract prices steady for the first half of this month during the bimonthly negotiations with their clients, mostly PC makers, according to the pricing information provided by TrendForce.
However, chipmakers “are under pricing pressure as demand weakens in the slack season,” the report said.
FIRE
In addition, SK Hynix, the world’s No. 2 memorychip maker, began shipping chips from its fire-damaged plant in Wuxi, China, this month, which is “helping ease a supply constraint,” TrendForce said.
SK Hynix restored part of the plant’s capacity, about 30,000 wafers a month, last month and has increased its DRAM chip supply from plants in South Korea, TrendForce said.
SK Hynix aims to boost its supply to the same level the Wuxi plant produced before the fire, it said.
The Wuxi plant, which has a monthly capacity of 130,000 wafers, is expected to be fully back in operation by next quarter, TrendForce said.
The movement of DRAM spot prices clearly reflected a downtrend in prices, the report said.
The price of mainstream 2Gb chips fell 9.2 percent to US$1.98 per unit from a high of US$2.8 early this month, TrendForce said.
The price of 4Gb chips declined 3.4 percent to below US$4 per unit during the same period, it said.
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技), the nation’s top DRAM chipmaker, said last month that it expected DRAM prices to remain flattish, or even to rise modestly this quarter from last quarter, citing supply constraint.
GLOBAL CAPACITY
Next year, global DRAM capacities are expected to grow 28 percent annually, much slower than the 50 percent growth during the industry’s peak, TrendForce forecast. That would help stabilize the DRAM industry, it said.
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
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says 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
RSS