Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) revenue rose 33 percent year-on-year last month, accelerating from the previous month thanks to demand for servers powering artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Apple Inc’s main manufacturing partner, also known as Foxconn, reported sales of NT$548.3 billion (US$17.1 billion) — a record for August. That pace was up sharply from an annual growth of 22 percent in July.
Hon Hai’s topline has begun to recover from a protracted smartphone slump, helped by a growing business supplying data center operators with servers containing Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators.
Photo: CNA
Last month, it said it expected revenue to grow over the rest of the year, reversing successive quarterly declines.
Some investors preach caution. Nvidia reported earnings that failed to live up to expectations, triggering a record selloff. Analysts have issued fresh warnings that AI’s potential is thus far largely untested and unproven.
Still, Hon Hai has set itself the goal of securing 40 percent of the global AI server market, relying on relationships with many of the world’s biggest tech companies and its own manufacturing expertise.
The Taiwanese company also benefits from consumer electronics demand, and the addition of AI features and enhancements might encourage mobile users to upgrade their devices. Shipments of the iPhone in China have in recent months bounced back, and the global smartphone market is recovering. Apple is preparing to unveil the iPhone 16 next week.
“Entering the peak season in the second half of the year, we anticipate our operation to gradually gain momentum,” Hon Hai said in a statement yesterday.
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
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.