Chinese server maker Inspur Group Ltd (浪潮集團) started a campaign to lure clients from IBM Corp as China studies whether domestic banks’ reliance on IBM technology threatens national security.
Jinan-based Inspur this week unveiled its “IBM to Inspur” campaign, said an Inspur marketing employee who asked not to be named, citing company policy.
The move could help Inspur capitalize on a dispute with the US after prosecutors there charged five Chinese military officers in the alleged hacking of US companies.
Inspur’s reported 36.7 billion yuan (US$5.9 billion) of revenue in 2011 equaled 5.5 percent of IBM’s sales.
“There aren’t that many alternatives for high-end banking servers, so it’s quite hard to find replacements,” Taiwan-based UBS analyst Arthur Hsieh (謝宗文) said by telephone.
The People’s Bank of China, China’s Ministry of Finance and other Chinese agencies are reviewing domestic banks’ use of IBM servers and expanding a trial program to replace them with homegrown ones, four people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
China Postal Savings Bank Co (中國郵政儲蓄銀行) is using Inspur servers in the trial, which began in March last year, the people said.
Inspur International Ltd shares rose 9.9 percent to HK$1.67 in Hong Kong trading yesterday, compared with a 0.6 percent increase in the benchmark Hang Seng Index. A unit trading in Shenzhen climbed by the 10 percent daily limit.
China is issuing rules because Internet and information safety are important parts of its security, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) said on Wednesday in Beijing.
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
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
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
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