Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) has increased its investment in India and Vietnam, which sources said were likely made to expand capacity for Apple Inc products and artificial intelligence (AI) servers.
Since Oct. 25 last year, the company has bought US$32.26 million in equipment from Apple Operations Ltd for its Indian operation through subsidiary Foxconn Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development Private Ltd, Hon Hai said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.
While the company said the purchases were made to meet operational needs, the sources believed the investment was made to support AirPods production for Apple in India.
Photo: Bloomberg
India’s news media last month reported that Hon Hai was scheduled to begin manufacturing AirPods this month in a facility in Hyderabad, the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana.
The reports said AirPods would be the second Apple product Hon Hai rolls out in India after iPhones.
The sources said Hon Hai, also known globally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has repeatedly purchased equipment from Apple Operations, and that previous purchases were for iPhone production in India.
Hon Hai has also injected an additional US$23.4 million into Fulian Precision Technology Co in Vietnam through another subsidiary — Ingrasys (Singapore) Pte Ltd — as a long-term investment, the filing showed.
Fulian Precision was set up in 2023 in Vietnam’s Quang Chau Province, and specializes in producing servers and server racks, as well as communications devices.
The sources said Hon Hai’s increasing investments in Vietnam were aimed at expanding its AI server production.
AI servers are expected to account for 50 percent of Hon Hai’s total server revenue and seize a more than 40 percent share of the global AI server market this year, as the company expands AI server capacity in several areas, including Taiwan, the US, Mexico and Vietnam, it said.
In China’s hilly Guizhou Province, a cluster of European-style buildings complete with clock tower and multi-arched bridge emits a low, permanent hum — a clue to its unexpected identity as tech giant Huawei’s largest data center. The town-like complex is unique in design, but not in its placement. Dozens of data centers have been constructed in the southwestern province in the past few years. They are part of a government strategy that has seen much of the digital infrastructure for breakneck artificial intelligence (AI) development across China’s eastern seaboard established in the country’s less populated, rural west. The build-out is ongoing. China
AM Intelligence, an Indian artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company, has ordered 9,000 Nvidia Corp Vera Rubin systems, seeking to become one of the first adopters of the advanced computing platform in Asia. Servers equipped with the rack-scale systems are slated to come online next year in southern India, the Hyderabad-based company said in a statement yesterday. Customers include major cloud service providers, AI labs and organizations aiming to develop homegrown Indian AI models, it said. Supplies of high-end Nvidia compute clusters remain tight. Demand from data centers and companies such as Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Amazon.com Inc to train AI models
Xiaomi Corp (小米) has launched a mobile processor for its marquee devices, putting pressure on Qualcomm Inc and MediaTek Inc (聯發科), which for years supplied the key component to the Chinese company. The Xring O3 system-on-a-chip advances Xiaomi’s in-house semiconductor design efforts with more power-efficient image processing and better artificial intelligence capabilities, the Beijing-based company said in a post on Sina Weibo yesterday. The company’s new silicon is made using a 3-nanometer fabrication process, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun (雷軍) said in a WeChat post . That is closer to the node used for Apple Inc’s most recent A19 Pro chips and well ahead
EXPANDING: Firms are accelerating commercialization of the technologies as the industry moves beyond chip-level speeds to upgrading rack-to-rack links, SEMI said Silicon photonics and copackaged optics (CPO), technologies seen as critical to meeting the surging bandwidth demands of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, would be among the main themes at the Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, event organizer SEMI said yesterday. The forum runs until Friday at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, with technical forums beginning today. The event is expected to set a record in terms of the number of participants, SEMI said, projecting more than 1,300 exhibitors from 65 countries across 4,300 booths and more than 100,000 attendees. Optical interconnects underpinning AI infrastructure would be one of the highlights, with