Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI).
Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia.
The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland.
Photo: AP
Huang further fueled that rally with his comments on Wednesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying that the global AI buildout would require trillions of dollars of investment.
He told delegates that today’s AI boom “has started the largest infrastructure buildout in human history.”
“We’re now a few hundred billion dollars into it... There are trillions of dollars of infrastructure that needs to be built out in fields including energy, cloud computing and electronics,” he said.
South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix Inc closed up about 2 percent in Seoul, while in Japan tech investment giant Softbank Group Corp jumped 11.61 percent, with chip firms Advantest Corp 4.96 percent higher and Tokyo Electron Ltd up 3.13 percent.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), Asia’s largest stock, was up 1.15 percent in Taipei.
“Davos is all about AI Revolution,” Wedbush Securities Inc analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note. “While there are clearly geopolitical worries in a constantly changing global landscape, the one thing that is clear from Davos is that the US tech world is dominating the AI Revolution, with China a distant second.”
The AI boom is riding high into this year, defying concerns about lofty valuations, as well as tensions between various nations. Earnings due later yesterday from Intel Corp might shed further light on crucial industry capital expenditure plans, along with results next week from Apple Inc and Meta Platforms Inc.
“The expansion of AI infrastructure and a surge in data storage demand are further tightening overall supply,” Eugene Asset Management Co chief investment officer Ha Seok-keun said in Seoul. “The market is now increasingly pricing in these strengthened industry fundamentals.”
While AI’s funding needs are massive, there seems to be no shortage of investors willing to pile in through private deals as well as in the markets. OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman has been meeting with top investors in the Middle East to line up funding for an investment round of at least US$50 billion, at a valuation of about US$750 billion to US$830 billion.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
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