Electronics manufacturing service provider Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said revenue from its artificial intelligence (AI) server business is expected to grow by a triple-digit percentage this year, following a surge last year of those proportions driven by demand for AI applications.
Pegatron’s AI server business has entered a phase of rapid expansion, company co-chief executive officer Gary Cheng (鄭光志) told reporters at a company event.
In addition to its graphics processing unit-based server shipments, such as Nvidia Corp’s GB200 and GB300 models, Pegatron is also expanding into the design and production of inference servers and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)-based systems, Cheng said.
Photo: CNA
The firm is cooperating with several major customers in the inference area, with contributions expected to begin materializing in the second half of this year, he said.
Pegatron’s AI server customer base includes major cloud service providers (CSPs), small and mid-sized data centers, as well as enterprise customers, he said.
Training-focused projects typically generate greater revenue and are better suited to its capabilities, Cheng said, adding that the firm plans to step up deployments with large CSPs this year.
While the company has secured orders to make ASIC-powered servers, with shipments expected to begin this year, the projects would mainly focus on transformer-based training and inference applications, Pegatron co-chief executive officer Johnson Teng (鄧國彥) said.
ASIC projects differ from traditional server business, as some customers design their own AI chips and act as system solution providers, Teng said.
As a result, Pegatron’s role extends beyond board-level manufacturing to full system integration, including high-end “Level 10” and “Level 11” servers, as well as thermal and liquid-cooling solutions, which places greater demands on supply-chain coordination, Cheng said.
In the small and medium-sized enterprise and enterprise segments, Pegatron early last year secured a major Taiwanese customer and has seen steady progress in related projects, he said.
Pegatron’s new facility in Mexico, which is to focus on AI server production, entered trial production at the end of last year and is ready for mass production, he said.
Construction of a company plant in Texas is expected to be completed by the end of March, with trial production to begin soon, he said.
In Taiwan, the company last year built two new plants in Taoyuan, which are to begin production this year, Cheng said.
As local production in the electric vehicle (EV) sector becomes more pronounced across North America, as well as China and the rest of Asia, Pegatron has allocated most of its local EV product production to Mexico and North America to avoid high tariff requirements, Cheng said.
The company aims to maintain double-digit growth in its EV business this year, he said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as