China plans to bid for contracts to build US high-speed train lines and is stepping up exports of rail technology to Europe and Latin America, a government official said on Saturday.
China has built 6,500km of high-speed rail for its own train system and US President Barack Obama issued a pledge in November with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) to cooperate in developing the technology.
“We are organizing relevant companies to participate in bidding for US high-speed railways,” Wang Zhiguo (王志國), a deputy railways minister, told a news conference.
Wang gave no details of where China’s railway builders might seek contracts, but systems are planned in California, Florida and Illinois. He said state-owned Chinese companies were building high-speed lines in Turkey and Venezuela.
Beijing plans to construct a 25,000km high-speed rail network by 2020 in a 2 trillion yuan (US$300 billion) project it hopes will spur economic and technology development. A new line linking the central city of Wuhan with Guangzhou near Hong Kong is billed as the world’s fastest at 380kph.
China produces high-speed trains using French, German and Japanese technology. Its manufacturers have developed a homegrown version, but have yet to produce a commercial model.
Chinese rail authorities have signed cooperation memos with California and Russia and state companies plan to bid on a line in Brazil linking Rio de Janeiro with Sao Paulo, Wang said. He said Saudi Arabia and Poland also have expressed interest.
The White House announced US$8 billion in grants in January for rail projects including the high-speed systems in California, Florida and Illinois.
“China is willing to share its mature and advanced technology with other countries to promote development of the world’s high-speed railways,” Wang said.
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,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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