In March, China Resources announced the stunning news of acquiring SMIC's shares of JCET Group, a packaging and testing firm invested by China's National IC Industry Investment Fund (the "Big Fund"). The deal is a delicately calculated move rendering China Resources control over JCET and Sandisk.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's keynote at COMPUTEX 2024, specifically mentioned the collaboration with TSMC, which allowed Intel to realize the mass production of Lunar Lake in advancing AI PCs. This move raises questions about whether it is an attempt to repair the relationship with TSMC.
Semiconductor foundry companies have started to compete in the 2nm process shortly after their 3nm production lines started humming to mass produce for customers. There is something to learn from Samsung's 6-month lead to producing 3nm wafers with Gate-All-Around (GAA) architecture in June 2022.
The long-rumored third phase of China's national semiconductor fund, commonly known as "the Big Fund," has finally been officially announced. The fund scale of CNY344 billion (US$47.5 billion) makes it the largest funding project in China's chip history and far exceeds previous market expectations.
Announcing a US$47.5 billion funding for Phase 3 of the National IC Industry Investment Fund (the "Big Fund"), China's next move is under the eye of global chip players.
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a graphic memory with high bandwidth. Its main function is to support High-Performance Computing (HPC) or high-speed parallel computing with CPU/GPU in Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing.
The semiconductor industry is the lifeblood of South Korea, a country that heavily depends on its exports. In 2023, South Korea exported US$131 billion of semiconductors and imported US$106 billion, raking in US$25 billion in trade surplus. For Taiwan, when there is a trade deficit, it only amounts to a fraction of its foreign reserve, but that would be a heavy burden to South Korea, which is already shouldering US$663.6 billion in foreign debt.
China's Huawei claims to have successfully achieved domestic substitution of using its self-developed 7nm and 5nm chips in its smartphones and has boosted market standings of HiSilicon and SMIC.
The cutthroat price competition in China in the past year has pressured many local automakers, resulting in significant losses. Some companies might have accepted their falling EV sales and withdrawn from the price war, a strategy to improve their losses.
In recent days, both OpenAI and Amazon have seen significant changes in their senior leadership teams. While the reshuffling may seem coincidental, it highlights the similar challenges both companies face in balancing agility with maintaining a controversy-free image.
Since the turn of the century in the year 2000, the changes brought to the world by digital technology and the Internet can be roughly categorized into four phases. The first phase was the post-dot-com bubble era in the early 2000s, and the leading vendors of this era were Nokia and Cisco, which provided networking equipment.
