Malaysia is targeting at least 500 billion ringgit (US$107 billion) in investment for its semiconductor industry, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said yesterday, as the Southeast Asian country looks to position itself as a global manufacturing hub.
Malaysia is a major player in the semiconductor industry, accounting for 13 percent of global testing and packaging. It has attracted multibillion-dollar investments from leading firms in recent years, including Intel Corp and Infineon Technologies AG.
Anwar said the investment being sought would be for integrated circuit design, advanced packaging and manufacturing equipment for semiconductor chips.
Photo:Karim Jaafar, AFP
Malaysia also wants to establish at least 10 local companies in design and advanced packaging for semiconductor chips, with revenues between US$210 million to US$1 billion, Anwar said in a speech at an industry event.
The Southeast Asian country will allocate US$5.3 billion in fiscal support to meet these targets, he added, saying further details would be announced later.
“We have a strong capacity to diversify and move higher in the value chain ... to move towards even more high-end manufacturing, semiconductor design and advanced packaging,” Anwar said.
He did not specify a timeline for the targets to be met.
On April 22, Anwar said Malaysia planned to build Southeast Asia’s largest integrated circuit design park and would offer incentives including tax breaks, subsidies and visa exemption fees to attract global tech companies and investors.
He said the proposed integrated circuit design park was part of Malaysia’s efforts to move beyond backend chip assembly and testing and into high-value, front-end design work.
Malaysia is seen as well placed to grab further business in the semiconductor sector, as Chinese chip firms diversify outside of China for assembling needs.
China’s xFusion Digital Technologies Co (超聚變), a former Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unit, said in September last year that it would partner with Malaysia’s NationGate Holdings Bhd to manufacture GPU servers — servers designed for data centers and which are used in artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing.
Shanghai-based StarFive Technology Co (賽昉) is also building a design center in Malaysia’s Penang state, while chip packaging and testing firm TongFu Microelectronics Co (通富微電) said in 2022 it would expand its Malaysia facility — a venture with US chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Germany’s Infineon said in August last year it would invest 5 billion euros (US$5.4 billion) to expand its power chip plant in Malaysia, while US chipmaker Intel announced in 2021 it would build a US$7 billion advanced chip packaging plant in the country.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
RSS