Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星科技) plans to expand its production capacity in the US, with in-house server output at its US plant likely to exceed its earlier projection of 60 percent of total output.
The company in June said that it was targeting producing 60 percent of its US server output at its California facility and outsource the remaining 40 percent. The California plant is set to produce servers, PCs and gaming products.
However, the company might adjust the in-house production figure after Washington announced a 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods last week and pending the outcome of a Section 232 investigation under the US Trade Expansion Act of 1962, as clients might request higher capacity in the US, a source said yesterday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Photo: CNA
While the company had planned to begin production at its California facility this quarter, the facility is still undergoing structural reinforcement and its operations might not be ready until the end of this year, the source said.
MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage and communications devices, with operations in Taiwan, China and the US.
The company plans to set up a warehousing unit for motherboards, graphics cards and notebooks in the Netherlands, set to start operations at the end of the year, the source said.
The company has been building a new plant in Taoyuan’s Gueishan District (龜山) since March, which is to add eight surface mount technology production lines in 2027, the source said.
The Europe, Middle East and Africa region accounted for 38 percent of MSI’s revenue last year, while North America made up 25 percent, company data showed.
The company might share tariff costs with clients such as Intel Corp, Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Nvidia Corp, as well as with consumers, to maintain its gross margin, but it is unlikely to pass the full tariff rate on to retail prices, as doing so could raise prices by 10 to 20 percent and dampen consumer demand, the source said.
MSI’s PCs and notebooks that use Nvidia’s RTX 50 series graphics cards entered mass production last quarter, but consumer demand for those products has exceeded supply, the source said.
The company has no plans to raise prices for existing models, despite potential tariff impacts, but would raise prices for future products equipped with newer generations of central processing units and graphics processing units, the source said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS