The nation’s foreign exchange reserves last month grew US$1.91 billion to a record US$560.28 billion, as the US dollar weakened after the collapses of US regional banks and Switzerland’s Credit Suisse Group AG, boosting the value of assets in other currencies, the central bank said yesterday.
The currency movements were related to market expectations that the US Federal Reserve would raise its policy rate one more time before its pauses tightening to help support the economy and financial stability, Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民) told an online news conference.
The US dollar is unlikely to appreciate, as recession concerns deepen following a series of bank failures caused in part by drastic interest rate hikes that are weighing on bonds and securities held by financial institutions.
Photo: CNA
The Fed has since introduced temporary and selective easing measures to avoid a credit crunch.
The trend could explain why the British pound advanced 3.11 percent against the US dollar, the Euro rose 2.91 percent, the yuan increased 1.08 percent and the New Taiwan dollar gained 0.09 percent, Tsai said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange market was relatively quiet, with less need for interventions, he said.
Foreign portfolio managers remitted US$3.79 billion of principal, but wired a similar amount of profit abroad, Tsai said.
The central bank’s management also helped shore up a foreign exchange reserve balance that gave Taiwan the fourth-highest ranking after China, Japan and Switzerland, Tsai said.
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
TECH BOOST: New TSMC wafer fabs in Arizona are to dramatically improve US advanced chip production, a report by market research firm TrendForce said With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) pouring large funds into Arizona, the US is expected to see an improvement in its status to become the second-largest maker of advanced semiconductors in 2027, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report last week. TrendForce estimates the US would account for a 21 percent share in the global advanced integrated circuit (IC) production market by 2027, sharply up from the current 9 percent, as TSMC is investing US$65 billion to build three wafer fabs in Arizona, the report said. TrendForce defined the advanced chipmaking processes as the 7-nanometer process or more
RSS