The US cannot achieve a totally independent semiconductor supply chain, as it needs partners, including Taiwan, to provide key components and engineering talent, Japan’s former “chip czar” Akira Amari said in Taipei yesterday.
In his address at the Yushan Forum, Amari said US President Donald Trump is aiming to achieve full self-sufficiency for the US in the semiconductor industry.
Toward that end, Trump has persuaded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to pledge an additional US$100 billion over the next few years to expand its semiconductor manufacturing operations in the US, Amari said.
Photo: Toru Hanai, Bloomberg
Even then, US self-sufficiency is “impossible,” he said.
“Allied and like-minded countries should concentrate on their strengths to build a complete supply chain rather than putting everything in America,” he said.
Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium and South Korea are strong in manufacturing, and ASEAN members produce high-quality chip components, he said.
“We need to combine the strengths of countries around the world,” Amari said.
The success of TSMC relies heavily on its talented engineers at all levels of the organization, he said, adding that the company’s high yield rate at its first fab in Arizona was because most of the 1,300 workers were Taiwanese.
That talent is critical to a strong chip industry, he said.
Yet the US would eventually insist that TSMC use US workers, which would be a problem, because US workers are extremely protective of their labor rights and take little initiative to do their jobs better, Amari said.
Another factor is that to prevent the leaking of confidential information, allied countries have to work together rather than go it alone, he said.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its