Taiwan has increasingly shifted its investment focus away from China to the ASEAN and US markets, as major tech firms seek to improve supply chain resilience and diversify investment risks, DBS Group Holdings Ltd said in a report yesterday.
Taiwan’s tech sector would remain competitive globally over the next five years while increasing supply chain resilience ranks a top priority, Singapore-based DBS economist Ma Tieying (馬鐵英) said in the report.
ASEAN is set to become Taiwan’s largest foreign direct investment destination, after foreign direct investment in ASEAN member states totaled US$4 billion in the first 10 months of last year, Ma said.
Photo: CNA
It accounted for 32 percent of all outward foreign direct investment, a sharp increase from 14 percent before US-China trade tensions began in 2017, she said.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) globally, and Pegatron Corp (和碩) have expanded investment in Vietnam and India to assemble smartphones, PCs, tablets and other electronics for their clients, notably Apple Inc, Ma said.
Contract chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) has also spent US$5 billion building a new 22 and 28-nanometer wafer fab in Singapore, she added.
The US is emerging as a major investment destination for Taiwanese companies.
Taiwan’s direct investment in the US exceeded US$8 billion in the past four years, nearly a fourfold increase from US$2.2 billion between 2013 and 2017, driven largely by investment in the semiconductor sector, Ma said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (台積電) first foundry in Arizona, which is under construction, is expected to start to producing 4-nanometer chips next year.
The world’s largest advanced chipmaker has said that it also plans to produce 3-nanometer chips at the Arizona fab by 2026.
At the same time, inbound foreign direct investment in Taiwan’s electricity and gas sector rose more than 10 times to US$1.5 billion over the first 10 months of last year, the report said.
Foreign direct investment from European countries increased nearly fourfold from a year earlier, with Denmark’s Orsted A/S, for instance, augmenting its investment in the wind farm projects in Changhua County, it said.
Taiwan’s green energy transition has begun to gain momentum, creating greater opportunities for foreign investors, the report said.
Electricity from renewable energy sources surged 36 percent year-on-year in the first 10 months of last year, making up 8 percent of all electricity supply, up from 6 percent a year earlier, it said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS