Carbon Cutting and the “Wafer Queen”

Hello everyone, that is Cheng Ting FangYour #techAsia host for this week.

My recent vacation to Florence, Italy to explore the birthplace of the Renaissance and town's famous museums was an exquisite getaway. After a leisurely stroll up a hill to Piazzale Michelangelo, I used to be rewarded with a surprising sunset and a vigorous concert. And to essentially unwind from the hectic pace of the tech industry, I also immersed myself in several Korean dramas while I used to be away.

But once I returned to work this week, I quickly found myself back within the semiconductor world. A visit to the huge ASML chip-making tool remanufacturing center within the Taiwanese city of Taoyuan got me fascinated with probably the most pressing issue often faced by the tech industry: How to aggressively reduce one's carbon footprint.

An important aspect of this reduction is minimizing waste through reuse and recycling. In the ASML clean room I visited, engineers rework the corporate's PAS 5500 series lithography machines – the longest-lasting model from Europe's leading chip tool maker, first introduced greater than 30 years ago.

Although they can’t be used to supply probably the most advanced AI processors, these machines are still useful for producing various sensors, accelerometers, and ultra-low power chips. Since the middle began operations, it has brought back decommissioned equipment from chip factories all over the world, dismantled it, dismantled it for parts, and repaired and reassembled over 130 sets of machines to place them back into use.

The team has even developed and redesigned parts which might be now not available from suppliers and repaired almost every component of existing machines. The reuse rate of all defective parts is 88 percent. Here the corporate has expanded from a small team of engineers to over 100 employees.

The circular economy has evolved from a theoretical concept to a significant theme within the technology industry, driven by global leaders resembling Apple, Google, TSMC and ASML. But one other crucial element in reducing CO2 emissions is Access to renewable energywhich ASML and lots of other chip and technology firms in Asia find a significant challenge.

After years of challenges, ASML finally secured some renewable energy sources in Taiwan. The company can also be actively exploring green energy options in South Korea, where it has a major presence but limited renewable resources. Notably, ASML already sources 100% of its energy from renewable sources within the United States, Europe and China.

Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, told me the green energy outlook in Taiwan and South Korea has improved significantly in comparison with two years ago and is less worrisome. “When it involves the semiconductor industry, sustainability might be key (to future competitiveness),” the CEO said.

Lora Ho, senior vice chairman of TSMC and chair of the ESG Committee, echoed this sentiment, saying that prior to now an organization would have pursued ESG (environmental, social and governance) efforts when time and resources permitted. But today ESG is an important consider maintaining competitiveness. “For younger generations like Generation Z, whether an organization has ESG commitment is a key consider deciding to work there,” Ho said.

Sustainability: Color it Gold

Doris Hsu, chairman and CEO of GlobalWafers, the world's third-largest wafer maker, considered sustainability and access to renewable energy as a very powerful critical aspects when her company decided where to expand production activities, in response to an exclusive interview with Cheng Ting Fang And Lauly Li from Nikkei Asia.

“For example, we could have built our Texas plant in South Korea or in Taiwan, but the most important difference is that access to green energy is insufficient in most of Asia,” she said. She added that wafer materials made with green energy might be more competitive and preferred by customers than those made with fossil energy sources.

Hsu is nicknamed the “Wafer Queen” and her company is expanding in several countries, including the United States, Italy, Japan and South Korea, along with its home base of Taiwan, to construct a more diverse production base. The company can also be considering expanding capability in Malaysia.

Despite a subdued macroeconomic outlook for 2024, Hsu expects double-digit percentage growth within the wafer materials market in 2025 and continued growth in 2026. This growth might be driven by recoveries and increases in applications for the electronics market.

My son's OpenAI bet

SoftBank's Masayoshi Son is making good on his promise to “go on the counteroffensive” by investing $500 million in OpenAIas a part of an enormous fundraising effort that may value the bogus intelligence startup at $150 billion, George Hammond in San Francisco writes for the Financial Times.

Son has been trimming his fund over the past two years, retreating after SoftBank went through a period of no spending during which he poured tens of billions into various startups. Some of those, resembling the co-working company WeWork, later failed spectacularly.

But the growing enthusiasm for AI over the past two years, sparked by OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, has seen Son retreat from the sidelines. The group is already majority owner of British chip designer Arm, and SoftBank now plans to take a position in OpenAI through its Vision Fund, a big startup-backing vehicle made up mostly of Son's personal wealth, in response to two individuals with knowledge of the deal.

The Japanese group is participating in one of the crucial hyped financing rounds of the yr, a bet that OpenAI can proceed the rapid pace of growth that has seen revenue surge to just about $4 billion. Some investors in the corporate imagine it could ultimately be value $1 trillion or more.

Automation ka-ching

The shortage of technicians and expert staff is a typical challenge for a lot of major economies, from Japan and South Korea to the United States. One possible solution is to extend investment in automation and permit machines and robots to help with manufacturing tasks.

Nikkei Asia Mitsuru Obe visited Mitsubishi Electric's largest factory in Nagoya, where the corporate builds industrial robots and precision machines. A flagship machine can drill 6,000 holes per second at different depths in multi-layer materials, a very important tool for manufacturing circuit boards for AI computing.

Mitsubishi Electric said its automation division is significantly more profitable than its other businesses and offers promising revenue growth prospects. While Japan stays its most vital market, the corporate sees latest opportunities in other Asian economies as several nations within the region compete to grow to be the following major manufacturing base. The current low penetration of factory automation systems in these regions offers significant growth potential.

Meta's Vietnam vision

Vietnam has grow to be a middle for electronics production recently secured one other win.

Facebook parent company Meta announced that it would launch its latest virtual reality headset, the Quest 3S, within the Southeast Asian country in 2025. The US social networking giant hopes it would spur growth in a key market with 75 million users, its seventh market. largest on the earth, Lien Hoang from Nikkei Asia writes.

Facebook also plans to launch more AI services in Vietnam in the approaching months, resembling a Vietnamese-speaking virtual assistant Meta AI and Business AI for Messenger.

However, because Vietnam is a one-party state, Facebook faces challenges in upholding freedom of expression and must work with Vietnamese authorities to combat information the state deems harmful, toxic or false.

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