The Philippines is counting on the world’s shift to green technology and demand induced by the COVID-19 pandemic for data centers to boost investments in its mining industry, a top official said.
The end of a ban on new mining permits also positions the sector to attract funds for a shift toward processing instead of simply exporting ores, said Philippine Industry Development and Trade Policy Group Undersecretary Perry Rodolfo, who is also managing head of the Philippine Board of Investments (BOI).
The BOI separately aims to win about 1 trillion pesos (US$19.1 billion) in investment commitments from home and abroad this year, up 50 percent from last year.
“The Philippines is blessed when it comes to very critical minerals that are needed by everyone as we shift towards a more digitalized and greener world,” Rodolfo said in an interview on Friday, commenting on the demand for nickel, copper and cobalt.
“The next key thing is to really make sure that they are processed here and we add value prior to exporting them,” he said.
The Southeast Asian nation is the world’s second-biggest producer of nickel. The aim is to locally process ore into “precursors” for a wide array of products, including batteries used to power data centers and electric vehicles.
The plan fits well with the government’s move to promote investments in hyperscaler data centers that use big batteries. Economic managers recently ordered that the 40 percent foreign equity restrictions on solar, wind and tidal renewable energy projects be removed.
Firms planning data centers “have to use renewable energy. Otherwise, they will just be competing with other sectors in the Philippines for power,” Rodolfo said.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose six-year term ends on June 30, last week signed a strategic investment priority plan which lists activities such as environment and climate change-related projects eligible for tax incentives.
Rodolfo is optimistic that investors would continue coming in when Philippine president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr takes power.
“Each administration builds on the reform efforts of the past administration,” he said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS