Tech

Intel weighs boost to investment in Vietnam chip packaging plant

Published

1 year ago

February 10, 2023

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Intel weighs boost to investment in Vietnam chip packaging plant

Intel Corp (INTC.O) is considering a significant increase in its existing $1.5-billion investment in Vietnam to expand its chip testing and packaging plant in the Southeast Asian nation, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The possible move, which one source said could be worth about $1 billion, would signal a growing role for Vietnam in the global supply chain for semiconductors, as companies push to cut reliance on China and Taiwan because of political risks and trade tension with the United States.

One of the sources said the investment was likely to be made “over the future years” and could be even bigger than $1 billion, while the second person said Intel was also weighing an alternative investment in Singapore and Malaysia, which may be referred to as Vietnam.

Both sources sought anonymity as the plan was not yet public.

Asked about the possible investment plan, Intel told Reuters, “Vietnam is an important part of our global manufacturing network, but we have not announced any new investments.”

Officials of Vietnam’s investment and planning ministry and the provincial government of Ho Chi Minh City, where Intel has an existing plant, were not immediately available for comment.

A statement on the Vietnam government’s official portal was amended on Wednesday to remove a reference to an effort by Ho Chi Minh City to attract $3.3 billion in additional investment from Intel.

The chip packaging and testing factory in Vietnam’s southern commercial hub is Intel’s biggest worldwide. The company is estimated to have invested about $1.5 billion in it so far.

The U.S. chip giant already has extra land where its plant is based and an expansion in Vietnam would help it better manage supply disruptions stemming from relying heavily on a single country or a plant, one of the sources told Reuters, citing internal talks.

One of the sources said Intel was pondering the Vietnam investment while making sure a further expansion abroad would not be seen as a hostile move by Washington, which is pushing to boost the production of chips at home.

AGGRESSIVE PUSH

Vietnam is aggressively pushing to expand its chipmaking industry, courting foreign companies in all the three main segments of assembling, testing and packaging; manufacturing with fabs; and designing, officials said.

A U.S. industry executive told Reuters the country had big potential to grow quickly in the area of chip assembling and designing, whereas he saw developing chip-manufacturing fabs as a remote possibility, with the exception of cheaper-to-build fabs for less sophisticated, bigger chips that are still in high demand, such as those that go into cars.

The executive said Vietnam’s biggest opportunity was in the chip assembling sector to satisfy industry demand to reduce the “over-concentration” of production capacity in China and Taiwan, which together account for 60% of global capacity in that segment.

Designing chips require less capital and more highly skilled workers, and Vietnam was making inroads there too, the executive said, with U.S giant Synopsys having operations there and with local firms expanding fast, including FPT and state-owned Viettel.

Chips and electronics giant Samsung (005930. KS) opened a research facility in Hanoi late last year and has a semiconductors packaging plant in the country.

Following a global shortage of semiconductors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Intel announced a plan in late 2021 to invest more than $7 billion to build a new chip packaging and testing factory in Malaysia.

That facility is expected to begin production in 2024. Intel also has testing and packaging facilities in China and the United States.

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Tech

Apple CEO says looking into possibility of building manufacturing facility in Indonesia

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2024

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Apple CEO says looking into possibility of building manufacturing facility in Indonesia

Apple Inc will look into the possibility of building a manufacturing facility in Indonesia, its CEO said on Wednesday after meeting President Joko Widodo.

Apple CEO Tim Cook arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday, after visiting Vietnam. He met with Jokowi, as the president popularly known, and will be inaugurating an academy for Apple developers on the island of Bali.

“We talked about the president’s desire to see manufacturing in the country, and it is something that we will look at,” Cook told reporters after the meeting.

Apple has based much of its key manufacturing of iPads, AirPods and Apple Watches in Vietnam and suppliers for MacBooks are also investing in the country.

Apple has no manufacturing facilities in Indonesia but has established four Apple Developer Academies.

Indonesia has a huge tech-savvy population, making the Southeast Asian nation a key target market for tech-related investment.

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Tech

TikTok quizzed by EU on TikTok Lite launch in France, Spain

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2024

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TikTok quizzed by EU on TikTok Lite launch in France, Spain

ByteDance’s TikTok has been given 24 hours to provide a risk assessment on its new app TikTok Lite launched this month in France and Spain on concerns of its potential impact on children and users’ mental health, the European Commission said on Wednesday.

The move by EU industry chief Thierry Breton under EU tech rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) comes two months after he opened an investigation into TikTok over possible DSA breaches.

The landmark DSA requires companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover for violations.

The Commission on Wednesday said it had sent a request for information to TikTok, asking for more details on the risk assessment the social media company should have done before deploying TikTok Lite in the 27-country European Union.

“This concerns the potential impact of the new ‘Task and Reward Lite’ programme on the protection of minors, as well as on the mental health of users, in particular in relation to the potential stimulation of addictive behaviour,” the EU executive said in a document seen by Reuters.

“TikTok must provide the risk assessment for TikTok Lite in 24 hours and the other requested information by 26 April 2024, after which the Commission will analyse TikTok’s reply, and then assess next steps.”

The Commission also asked for details on measures the company has put in place to mitigate systemic risks.

TikTok Lite, an app with a new functionality aimed at users aged 18+, was launched in France and Spain this month.

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Tech

SiTime introduces chip aimed at saving power in AI data centers

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2024

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SiTime introduces chip aimed at saving power in AI data centers

SiTime (SITM.O) on Wednesday introduced a chip that it says is designed to help data centers built for artificial intelligence applications run more efficiently.

SiTime makes what are known as timing chips, whose job is set a steady beat for all the parts of a computer and keep them running together in sync, like a conductor in an orchestra directing multiple groups of instruments. The company says its new line of chips, called Chorus, can do so with 10 times more precision than older styles of timing chips.

SiTime CEO Rajesh Vashist said the company aims to help customers save electricity with that precision. SiTime’s chips themselves require less than a watt of power, but powerful AI chips such as Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) require more than 1,000 watts of power.

With a more precise clock to keep all the elements of a computer in sync, parts of the machine can be turned off for a few milliseconds at a time when they are not in use. Over the multiple years a power-hungry data center server might be in use, it can generate energy savings, though the amount will depend on how SiTime’s chips are used.

“We deliver timing that they can rely on so that they can wake up their products and bring data more efficiently to them, rather than just running more often,” Vashist said in an interview.

SiTime said the chips will be available in the second half of this year.

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