Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) is partnering with US artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Nvidia Corp to develop humanoid robots, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said on the sidelines of the Kaohsiung Smart City meeting on Friday.
The company is adopting Nvidia’s software technologies and hardware platforms to develop human-like robots and has set its sights on Kaohsiung to launch humanoid robot services, Liu said.
Hon Hai has already introduced non-humanoid robots as part of its production lines, using Nvidia’s technologies.
Photo: CNA
Local media cited Liu as saying the company is planning to introduce humanoid robots to other services, including the healthcare industry.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) has said that robots would become the next wave of AI development, predicting that upcoming innovations would be dominated by humanoid robots and self-driving cars.
While Hon Hai is working with Kaohsiung in smart city development, Liu said the company is also planning to cooperate with Taipei and Keelung governments in this field.
Hon Hai would integrate resources to allow software developers to gain access to its efforts in smart city development to establish an environment of sovereign AI, which refers to a nation’s capabilities to produce AI using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks, Liu said.
Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), is expected to see consolidated sales top NT$7 trillion (US$212.7 billion) this year on the back of strong global demand for AI applications, Liu said.
Hon Hai yesterday reported record consolidated sales of NT$6.86 trillion for last year, up 11.37 percent from a year earlier, and more than the NT$6.16 trillion in revenue posted for 2023 as a whole.
It came as the company reported better-than-expected sales growth in the final quarter of last year as the AI infrastructure buildout continued apace.
The company's sales over the past three months were NT$2.13 trillion, up 15.17 percent year-on-year, exceeding analyst expectations for a 13 percent rise.
Last month's sales rose 42.31 percent to NT$654.83 billion, also beating analysts' estimates, which the company attributed to a small shipment of GB200 servers powered by Nvidia's advanced Blackwell graphics processing units.
Hon Hai said in a statement that it expects mass production of AI servers to begin later this month and projects significant sales growth for the first quarter of this year.
Due to robust global demand, AI servers are forecast to make up 50 percent of Hon Hai’s server sales this year, and shipments of AI servers are likely to grow from quarter to quarter to become the most important driver of the company’s sales growth, it said.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should