The Japanese government yesterday approved ¥774 billion (US$6.8 billion) in funding for domestic semiconductor investment, backing up Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s commitment to make the nation a major global provider of essential computer chips.
The package, part of an extra budget for this fiscal year that the Cabinet approved yesterday, consists of three parts: ¥617 billion to fund domestic investment into cutting-edge chip manufacturing production capacity, ¥47 billion for legacy production such as analog chips and power management parts, and ¥110 billion for the research and development of next-generation silicon.
Tokyo is to spend part of the ¥617 billion package on a planned Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co-Sony Group Corp plant in Kumamoto Prefecture.
While the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has not elaborated on the exact amount that is to be used for the project, it has said it would pay “up to half” of the total investment needed for a project in this category.
For legacy chip production, aid for up to one-third of the total capital expenditure would be provided, the ministry said.
The approved budget is just the beginning of increased investment in the sector, with Japan’s ruling party and government making it a priority to support companies beefing up semiconductor production.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness