Storm warning

A man digs for sandworms in the Tamsui River estuary near Tamkang Bridge in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District yesterday. The Central Weather Administration issued a sea warning for Typhoon Saudel.

SPECIALTY SUPPLIES: Taiwan is ushering in a major shift in industrial upgrades and a local alliance will reinforce supply chain resilience, SEMI president Terry Tsao said SEMI Taiwan launched a semiconductor materials alliance yesterday to fortify industry resilience, capitalizing on surging domestic demand fueled by advanced nodes and next-generation packaging. Taiwan has been the world’s largest semiconductor materials consumer for 16 years in a row, the industry association said.

Taiwan purchased about US$21.7 billion of semiconductor materials last year, driven by artificial intelligence (AI)-related demand, SEMI data showed. The spending accounted for 30 percent of global semiconductor materials consumption, totaling US$73.2 billion, the data showed. “Demand for specialty gases, chemicals and key raw materials are rising in Taiwan, fueled by the technology advancements to 2-nanometer and advanced packaging technologies,” SEMI

HAND-IN-HAND: Nvidia’s inability to hold the line on prices reflects how much leverage memorychip makers have amid the surge in demand for AI infrastructure Some of Nvidia Corp’s biggest customers have been told that the prices of servers containing its artificial intelligence (AI) chips are going up more than 15 percent in many cases with memory costs soaring. The price hikes would go into effect on systems shipped early next year and impact systems including those with the flagship Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell chips, people familiar with the process said on condition of anonymity.

The increases would depend on the generation of Nvidia chips and the memory configurations, they said. Companies who build the servers under contract for large data center operators such as Microsoft

YouTube is offering millions of dollars to popular channels if they upload their videos to the site exclusively for a certain period of time, in an effort to halt Netflix Inc’s pursuit of its biggest stars, people familiar with the conversations said. The payment would come in a couple of different forms. YouTube has discussed directly financing some programs, and it has also offered to allot a portion of major brand deals to creators.

Although YouTube has not finalized deals with any creators, it is close an agreement with several partners, said the people, who declined to be identified because

AM Intelligence, an Indian artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company, has ordered 9,000 Nvidia Corp Vera Rubin systems, seeking to become one of the first adopters of the advanced computing platform in Asia. Servers equipped with the rack-scale systems are slated to come online next year in southern India, the Hyderabad-based company said in a statement yesterday. Customers include major cloud service providers, AI labs and organizations aiming to develop homegrown Indian AI models, it said.

Supplies of high-end Nvidia compute clusters remain tight. Demand from data centers and companies such as Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Amazon.com Inc to train AI models