Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is in early talks with the German government about potentially establishing a plant in the country, a senior executive said on Saturday.
Various factors, including government subsidies, customer demand and the talent pool, would influence its final decision, TSMC senior vice president of Europe and Asia sales Lora Ho (何麗梅) told reporters on the sidelines of a technology forum in Taipei.
The discussions come as the EU and others seek to increase domestic chip production to mitigate the risk of supply chain disruptions.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
The chipmaker has not discussed incentives with Berlin or decided on a location, Ho said.
TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) in June told shareholders that the Hsinchu-based company had begun assessments on setting up manufacturing operations in the European country.
The world’s largest contract chipmaker, which mostly produces domestically, has started to diversify over the past year to help meet demand in various major countries seeking to bolster domestic semiconductor production out of national security and self-sufficiency concerns.
It is building a US$12 billion facility in Arizona, and is set to soon start construction of a US$7 billion plant in Japan.
Meanwhile, the EU said it would unveil the “European Chips Act” in the first half of next year as part of its strategy to boost semiconductor production.
One of the goals would be to account for 20 percent of global production by 2030, the bloc said.
Separately, research teams at Intel Corp on Saturday unveiled work that the US company believes would help it keep speeding up and shrinking computing chips over the next 10 years, with several technologies aimed at stacking parts of chips on top of each other.
Intel’s Research Components Group introduced the work in papers at an international conference held in San Francisco.
The company is working to regain a lead in making the smallest, fastest chips that it has lost in the past few years to rivals like TSMC and Samsung Electronics Co.
The newly unveiled research gives a look into how Intel plans to compete beyond 2025.
One of the ways Intel is packing more computing power into chips by stacking up “tiles” or “chiplets” in three dimensions rather than making horizontally designed chips, it said.
Intel showed work that could allow for 10 times as many connections between stacked tiles, meaning that more complex tiles can be stacked on top of one another.
However, perhaps the biggest advance showed at the event was a research paper demonstrating a way to stack transistors — tiny switches that form the most basic building blocks of chips by representing the ones and zeros of digital logic — on top of one another.
Intel believes the technology would yield a 30 to 50 percent increase in the number of transistors it can pack into a given area on a chip.
Raising the number of transistors is the main reason chips have consistently gotten faster over the past 50 years.
“By stacking the devices directly on top of each other, we’re clearly saving area,” Intel Components Research Group director Paul Fischer said. “We’re reducing interconnect lengths and really saving energy, making this not only more cost efficient, but also better performing.”
VALUABLE STOCK: The company closed at NT$1,005 a share, on demand for AI and HPC chips, and is expected to issue a positive report during its earnings conference Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) shares rose 2.66 percent to close at a record high of NT$1,005 yesterday. as investors expect the company to continue benefiting from strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) chips. TSMC is the 19th member of the local bourse’s NT$1,000 stock club, which includes smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) and electric transformer manufacturer Fortune Electric Co (華城電機). Yesterday’s rally swelled TSMC’s market capitalization to NT$26.06 trillion (US$802.3 billion) and contributed about 211 points to the TAIEX, which closed up 350.1 points, or 1.51 percent, to 23,522.53, another record high, Taiwan Stock
SUPPORT: Large groups declined to invest in the country due to a lack of investment support, a Vietnamese government document indicated Vietnam has missed out on multibillion-dollar investments by multinationals including Intel Corp and LG Chem Ltd because it lacks sufficient investment incentives, the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment said in a document reviewed by Reuters. US chipmaker Intel had proposed to invest US$3.3 billion in a project in Vietnam and asked the country for “cash support” of 15 percent, but later decided to move the project to Poland, the ministry said in the document dated on June 29. South Korea’s LG Chem also skipped Vietnam to invest in a battery project in Indonesia, after having asked the Vietnamese government to cover
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) unloaded shares worth nearly US$169 million last month, the most he has netted in a single month, as insatiable demand for the chips used to power artificial intelligence (AI) drove the stock to fresh peaks. The sale of 1.3 million shares, his first of the year, came during a month when Nvidia’s market value rose above US$3 trillion for the first time. That briefly made it the world’s most valuable company and pushed Huang, 61, into the rarefied group of ultra-rich with fortunes above US$100 billion. The series of transactions were executed under a 10b5-1 trading
Google on Monday said it is planning to invest in New Green Power Co (NGP, 永鑫能源), a solar energy developer owned by BlackRock Inc, to build 1 gigawatt of solar capacity in Taiwan to supply clean energy for its local data center and offices. “Our investment in NGP, subject to regulatory approval, will serve as development capital toward its 1 GW pipeline of new solar projects, catalyzing critical equity and debt financing for those projects,” Google’s Data Center Energy global head Amanda Peterson Corio wrote on a company blog. It did not disclose financial details. “We expect to procure up to 300 megawatts