Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn says it is building the world’s largest production plant for Nvidia’s GB200 ‘superchips’
Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn said on Tuesday it is building the world’s largest production plant for US hardware leader Nvidia’s GB200 “superchips” that power artificial intelligence servers.
Foxconn, also known by its official name Hon Hai Precision Industry, is the world’s biggest contract electronics manufacturer and assembles devices for major tech companies, including Apple.
Ambitious to expand beyond electronics assembly, it has been pushing into areas ranging from electric vehicles to semiconductors and servers.
“We’re building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet,” senior executive Benjamin Ting said at the company’s annual “Hon Hai Tech Day”.
“I don’t think I can say where now, but it’s the largest on the planet,” said Ting, Foxconn’s senior vice president for the cloud enterprise solutions business.
Chairman Young Liu said while opening the two-day event that Foxconn would be “the first to ship these superchips”.
Liu later told reporters the new plant was in Mexico.
Unlike its rivals Intel, Micron and Texas Instruments, Nvidia does not manufacture its own chips but uses subcontractors.
Foxconn also unveiled new electric vehicle prototypes at the tech day—a seven-seater lifestyle multipurpose utility vehicle and a 21-seater bus.
It plans to do with electric vehicles what it did for gadgets—become a go-to contract builder.
Foxconn announced last year that it would team up with Nvidia to create “AI factories”—powerful data-processing centers that would drive the production of next-generation products.
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A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. Credit: Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File
Three scientists won last year’s physics Nobel for providing the first split-second glimpse into the superfast world of spinning electrons, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.
The 2023 award went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for their work with the tiny part of each atom that races around the center and is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it.
If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.
The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. It has been awarded 117 times. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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The Nobel Prize in physics is being awarded, a day after 2 Americans won the medicine prize (2024, October 8)
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Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it expected third-quarter profits to jump almost three-fold, but fell short of market expectations as it struggled to leverage robust demand for chips used in artificial intelligence servers.
The firm is the flagship subsidiary of South Korean giant Samsung Group, by far the largest of the family-controlled conglomerates that dominate business in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
The tech giant said in a regulatory filing that its July-September operating profits were expected to rise to 9.1 trillion won ($6.8 billion), up 274.5 percent from a year earlier.
But that was almost 12 percent lower than the average estimate, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, which cited its own financial data firm.
It is also down nearly 13 percent from the firm’s operating profit of 10.44 trillion won in the previous quarter.
Sales, meanwhile, were seen increasing 17.2 percent on-year to 79 trillion won.
Samsung’s management released a rare, separate statement on Tuesday to its customers, investors and employees, offering its apologies.
“Due to results that fell short of market expectations, concerns have arisen about our fundamental technological competitiveness and the future of the company,” said the statement, which was signed by Jun Young-hyun, the vice chairman of the company’s device solutions division.
“Many people are talking about Samsung’s crisis… We will make sure that the serious situation we are currently facing becomes an opportunity for a fresh start.”
Shares in Samsung fell 1.5 percent in Seoul on Tuesday.
Jene Park, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said that there had been “an expected decline” in Samsung’s memory sector.
“The downturn is attributed to delays in the supply of fifth-generation HBM (HBM3E) and a general reduction in memory demand,” Park told AFP.
“In the smartphone business, sales of new foldable devices seem to be below expectations, as competition among foldable suppliers is becoming more intense.”
Joanne Chiao, an analyst at Taipei-based research group TrendForce told AFP that in the foundry sector “the momentum for component stockpiling enters the off-season, capacity utilization rates at various foundries are generally flat or slightly declining”.
Samsung is expected to release its final earnings report at the end of this month.
The firm said last week it was planning to cut jobs in some of its Asian operations, describing the move as “routine workforce adjustments”.
Bloomberg reported that the layoffs could affect about 10 percent of the workforce in those markets.
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Scientist Alfred Nobel created the Nobel prizes in his last will and testament for those who have ‘conferred the greatest benefit on humankind’
An “invisibility cloak”, an atomic force microscope or quantum computing are some of the scientific achievements that could win a Nobel prize in physics Tuesday.
The award, to be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT) in Stockholm, is the second Nobel of the season after the Medicine Prize on Monday was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.
The US duo were honored for their discovery of microRNA and its role in how genes are regulated.
Predicting a winner is always tricky but this year, Nobel buzz has spotlighted, among others, Israeli-British physicist David Deutsch, a professor at the University of Oxford, and American mathematician Peter Shor.
David Pendlebury, head of analytics group Clarivate, which keeps an eye on potential Nobel science laureates, told AFP the duo might be honored “for their work in quantum algorithms and quantum computing”.
Pendlebury said the two researchers were among their top picks given the number of citations their papers had received.
At the same time, he said it would be “surprising” if the Nobel jury awarded quantum mechanics again, just two years after Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger won for their work into quantum entanglement.
‘Invisibility cloak’
In the field of quantum mechanics, other notables are Israeli Yakir Aharonov and Briton Michael Berry, who have both made discoveries which now bear their names.
Another favorite who has been speculated about as a potential winner for years is Britain’s John B. Pendry, who has become famous for his “invisibility cloak“, in which he uses materials to bend light to make objects invisible.
Italian-American Federico Capasso has also been mentioned for research into photonics—the science of light waves—and contributing to the invention and development of the quantum cascade laser.
Lars Brostrom, science editor at Swedish Radio, said one potential winner could be Swiss physicist Christoph Gerber “for the invention of the atomic force microscope together with Gerd Binnig and Calvin Quate”.
The Nobel prize only honors living scientists and Quate died in 2019, but if Germany’s Binnig were to share the honor it would be his second Nobel Prize in Physics after he won it in 1986 for the “design of the scanning tunneling microscope”.
Another pick for Brostrom would be Canadian-American astronomer Sara Seager.
Brostrom told AFP that Seager could be awarded for “new ways to find signatures of life in planetary atmospheres, how to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets to find those that could harbor life”.
The Nobel jury has a tradition of honoring multiple researchers at once, and another trio among those speculated about is Canadian-born Allan MacDonald, Israeli Rafi Bistritzer and Spain’s Pablo Jarillo-Herrero.
The three already won the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics “for pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene”, a discovery that has been hailed as having the potential to lead to an energy revolution.
‘Slow light’
Physics World’s online editor Hamish Johnston speculated in a podcast ahead of the prize that Danish physicist Lene Hau might be in line for a nod “for her work on slow light”.
In 1999, Hau and her team managed to slow down light by passing it through a cloud of atoms that had been deep chilled into a slow-moving state known as Bose-Einstein condensate.
Two years later, they managed to stop it completely, before speeding it back up.
Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Prizes honor those who have, in the words of prize creator and scientist Alfred Nobel, “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind”.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to France’s Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-Austrian Ferenc Krausz and Franco-Swede Anne L’Huillier for research using ultra quick light flashes that enable the study of electrons inside atoms and molecules.
The physics prize will be followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday, with the highly watched literature and peace prizes to be announced on Thursday and Friday respectively.
The economics prize wraps up the 2024 Nobel season on October 14.
The winners will receive their prize, consisting of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1 million check, from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.
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An out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Center Europe, will hear cases related to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube at first.
An independent appeals panel was unveiled Tuesday to decide disputes between social media firms and their users in the European Union over content posted on their platforms.
The out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Center Europe and backed by Meta’s own oversight board, will be established in Dublin under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
The act polices illegal content like hate speech and disinformation on the biggest online platforms, and allows for outside entities to establish mechanisms to resolve disputes.
“The body will initially decide cases relating to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, aiming to include more social media platforms over time,” the board said in a statement.
Meta’s oversight board—often described as a top court for the company’s content moderation decisions—is providing a one-time grant for the center.
Thomas Hughes, former oversight board chief, will be CEO of the new body and said it should begin accepting cases by the end of the year.
He told AFP it was a “game-changing moment” and confirmed users would be able to appeal to the appeals center for a wide range of disputes under the DSA.
This could be a decision to take down—or leave up—content a user believes is hate speech, incitement to violence or other categories deemed unacceptable.
The DSA aims to force the largest online companies to tackle illegal content or face fines of up to six percent of their global turnover.
The bloc has already used the DSA to probe Facebook and Instagram for failing to tackle election-related disinformation, and has accused X of breaching the rules with its blue-tick “verified” accounts.
Establishing a dispute resolution mechanism is part of the process to make the law fully operational.
Empowering Europeans
Meta established the oversight board in 2020 with a non-retractable trust fund of $130 million.
The panel has the power to overrule the company on content moderation decisions with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising to abide by their rulings.
Hughes explained that the oversight board’s trust had paid for the new appeals center, but once established it would take payments from users and the companies.
Users, he said, would pay a nominal fee of five euros ($5.50), which would be refunded if they won the appeal. Companies would pay around 100 euros for each case.
“It puts into the hands of individual users the ability to be able to challenge the decisions that are taken about their own content and what other content they see online as well,” he told AFP.
Last month, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s digital enforcer, explained to reporters that, at its heart, the DSA was about empowering Europeans to hold big tech to account.
“The DSA is not content moderation,” she said on a visit to the United States.
“It is a system to enable you to actually know what is taken down so that you can complain about it.”
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