Renesas Electronics Corp now believes that damage from a fire at its chip fabrication plant in northeast Japan was more extensive than first thought, a company spokeswoman said yesterday.
The company had initially said that 11 machines were damaged in a fire earlier this month at the Naka plant, but the Nikkei reported yesterday that the number of inoperable machines was now believed to be about 17.
While the Renesas spokeswoman would not confirm a specific number, she said that the chipmaker would share the extent of the damage by today.
Photo: AFP
Renesas had said that it would take at least one month to resume production on the wafer production line at the fire-hit fab, but replacing damaged machines could take several months.
An extended outage could add to a global shortage of chips that is disrupting some production of vehicles and electronic devices.
Renesas accounts for 30 percent of the global market for microcontroller units used in vehicles, and two-thirds of the chips produced at the facility are for the auto industry.
Shares of the firm yesterday edged upward 0.5 percent, in line with the broader Tokyo market.
A week ago, Renesas shares, and shares of big Japanese automakers, had tumbled following news of the fire.
The fire, caused by a power surge in one of the machines, came after an earthquake stopped production at the plant for three days last month.
In 2011, the plant shut down for three months after a deadly earthquake that devastated Japan’s northeast coast.
Separately yesterday, chip equipment maker Applied Materials Inc said that it terminated its US$2.2 billion deal to buy Japanese peer Kokusai Electric Corp from KKR & Co, as it did not get confirmation of a timely approval from the Chinese regulator.
Applied Materials had entered the deal in 2019, betting on a rise in demand for memory chips used at data centers, and in 5G smartphones and devices using artificial intelligence applications.
The chip equipment maker had said that the deal did not require the approval of the US Department of Justice, which had forced the company to scrap its US$10 billion takeover of Japan’s Tokyo Electron Ltd in 2015.
Applied is to pay a termination fee of US$154 million in cash to KKR HKE Investment for the deal, which was annulled on March 19.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS