Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) is to invest an additional US$569 million in Wisconsin to expand its operations in the US state and deepen its work in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, the company said yesterday.
The plan, approved by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp (WEDC), would anchor the company’s growth in Racine County and is expected to create about 1,400 local jobs, Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), said in a statement.
Hon Hai chief product officer Jerry Hsiao (蕭才祐), also general manager of Hon Hai USA, said the company is scaling up in Wisconsin to meet customers’ large-volume needs, as demand for data-related infrastructure has continued to surge.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA
Employees in Wisconsin already account for about one-quarter of Hon Hai’s US workforce, a figure the company expects to double by 2030 as the project moves forward, he said.
If Hon Hai meets its performance targets under the new WEDC plan, the state would provide up to US$16 million in tax incentives, the company said.
This is Hon Hai’s second incentive agreement with WEDC.
Under an amended contract signed in 2021, the company is eligible for up to US$80 million in tax credits by the end of this year if it invests US$672 million and creates at least 1,454 jobs, targets Hon Hai said it is on track to achieve.
The company has spent more than US$2 billion in Wisconsin in the past few years on payroll, capital expenditure and taxes, and generated about 1,500 jobs related to server production, the statement said.
The contract signed in 2021 was an acknowledgement of the company’s failure to meet its original goals articulated in 2017 when it first committed to building capacity in Wisconsin of US$10 billion in investment and the creation of 13,000 jobs.
Originally, the company said it would produce large flat panel displays for televisions and then smaller displays for other devices, but those plans were never realized.
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
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),
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
RSS