Demand for computing power driven by smart manufacturing, electric vehicles and smart cities remains strong and is expected to keep increasing, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said yesterday.
At a time when many people are reluctant to take low-paying jobs, combining artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics offers a viable solution for business transformation, Liu said.
In his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Liu said that Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), is developing a new generation of AI robots that go beyond simple hands and eyes.
Photo: I-hwa Cheng, AFP
By using Nvidia Corp’s Omniverse platform to equip the robots with brains trained through millions of simulations, they could be instantly effective in the real world and capable of transforming the manufacturing sector and supply chains, he said.
Factories would adopt extensive AI technologies to capture expert knowledge in areas such as defect resolution and equipment adjustments, with generative AI already handling 80 percent of the tasks, freeing humans to enable them to focus on high-value-work, he said.
These AI agents can learn, adapt and coordinate production, improving cycle time by more than 10 percent while generating tokens — the smallest unit of computation — laying the foundation for agentic AI and scaling expertise across factories, he said.
In addition to factory transformation, Hon Hai is developing smart electric vehicles (EVs) and smart city initiatives, with its electric buses — equipped with sensors to collect street data to be used in smart city applications — already operating in Kaohsiung, Liu said.
Hon Hai uses Nvidia technologies for smart cities, smart manufacturing and EVs, while it uses the Omniverse digital twin platform to build AI factories, he said.
The Omniverse enables developers to build AI-powered tools and services for industrial digitalization. With it, Hon Hai can simulate millions of training cycles, allowing robots to think and operate almost immediately upon deployment, Liu said.
Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) later joined Liu as a special guest during the keynote speech.
The products that Nvidia developed with its Taiwanese supply chain partners are highly complex, with the GB200 servers — built in collaboration with Hon Hai — containing 1.2 million components, weighing nearly 2 tonnes and valued at US$2 million to US$3 million per stack, Huang said.
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