Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) board of directors yesterday approved capital appropriations of US$29.62 billion to install and upgrade the firm’s chip manufacturing process technologies, as well as its advanced and mature packaging technology capacity.
The capital expenditure budget would also be for fab construction and installation of manufacturing facilities, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker said in a statement.
TSMC did not comment on reports that it was in talks with flat-panel display maker Innolux Corp (群創) to acquire an idle plant as it prepares to convert manufacturing equipment into a new chip packaging production line that is to use fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) technology.
Photo: AFP
Innolux said that about 60 percent of the idle plant’s manufacturing equipment could be reused for the FOPLP technology and its employees have a lot of experience and know-how about glass panel substrates, which are used in panel-level packaging to achieve heterogeneous integration of chips.
TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) last month told investors that the company was “looking at this kind of a panel-level fan-out technology,” as he believed the technology would be mature in about three years.
The chipmaker last month said it planned to spend US$28 billion to US$32 billion this year on new facilities and equipment, with a significant portion earmarked for advanced process technologies such as 2-nanometer technology.
About 10 percent of the capital budget would be for advanced packaging, testing and mask making, it said.
The board in the statement approved a cash dividend of NT$4 per share for the second quarter, as net profit was NT$247.85 billion (US$7.63 billion), or earnings per share of NT$9.56.
The board also gave the go-ahead for a new capital injection of up to US$7.5 billion to TSMC Arizona, a wholly owned subsidiary of TSMC, and the issuance of 2.353 million new “restricted shares” to attract and retain executives and talent, it 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
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
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
RSS