By Reuters | Updated: 26 September 2023

TOKYO, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML (ASML.AS) plans to set up a base in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido to support production at a chip plant for Japanese startup Rapidus, the company said on Tuesday.

An ASML spokesperson said the company will have a customer support team for Rapidus, but could not immediately confirm staff numbers. Nikkei, which first reported the news, said that 50 ASML engineers will install an ASML “EUV” machine on a prototype line in Chitose City, Hokkaido.

“We always have engineers that support our systems in our customers’ fabs,” the ASML spokesperson said, referring to customers’ factories.

Rapidus, which broke ground on its plant in Chitose City on Sept. 1, is receiving billions of yen in funding from the Japanese government as it seeks to break into the market for manufacturing custom-made, leading-edge microchips.

Rapidus is aiming to manufacture chips at the 2 nanometre process node, which will require using ASML’s most advanced EUV, or extreme ultraviolet, lithography tools to help create the circuitry of chips.

TSMC, Samsung, Intel and memory chip specialists SK Hynix and Micron currently manufacture using ASML’s EUV tools.

The Nikkei report said ASML is also expanding its existing support base for TSMC, which is building a major plant in Kumamoto in Japan.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

By Reuters | Updated: 26 September 2023

JERUSALEM, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Israeli high-tech firms raised $1.7 billion in the third quarter, preliminary data showed on Tuesday, in a sign that investment in startups is stabilising.

The amount raised in the third quarter was down 38% over the same period in 2022 but only 14% lower from the second quarter, the IVC Research Center and LeumiTech said in a report.

It noted that full quarterly data will be issued in October.

Israeli tech companies have raised $5.3 billion so far this year, with $1.9 billion coming in the second quarter. In all of 2022, tech firms raised nearly $16 billion, mainly in the first half before the global economic slowdown, higher interest rates and weak stock markets hit.

The Israeli government’s plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary has also harmed fundraising, with many investors wary and vocal about the country’s democratic health.

“We continue to see in the third quarter data the first signs of stabilisation in the amount and scope of fundraising, data that bring us back to the levels of 2018-19,” said LeumiTech CEO Maya Eisen Zafrir.

“In addition, we recognise a stabilisation in the rate of follow-on investments, an indication that the companies are beginning to adjust their value to the new interest rate environment.”

© Thomson Reuters 2023

By Reuters | Updated: 26 September 2023

TAIPEI, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Mexico’s northern state of Sonora wants to export clean energy to California and Arizona from a massive new solar farm project and play a role in the chip supply chain given TSMC’s (2330.TW) $40 billion investment in Arizona, Sonora’s governor said.

The first phase of the Puerto Penasco solar plant in the sprawling border state, which boasts some of the highest temperatures in the country, was inaugurated in February as part of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s flagship solar push, which officials have said could boast four additional plants.

During a visit to Taiwan, Sonora Governor Alfonso Durazo said the “Plan Sonora” solar energy project would not only help improve domestic connectivity to the national grid, but also to export to the United States.

“Not only Arizona, but also California. It’s part of its objective,” he told Reuters on Monday. “We want to convert our state into an exporter of clean energy, particularly for semiconductor and electric vehicle industries.”

Durazo said he would be meeting major Apple (AAPL.O) supplier Foxconn (2317.TW) while he was in Taipei to discuss possible investment in his state, though was not planning to meet TSMC.

Foxconn, which has made electric vehicles a major part of its future development strategy, has large operations in Mexico but no plants in Sonora.

“Our interest in Foxconn is in establishing semiconductor plants, and also, eventually, factories of some or all the stages of e-mobility,” added Durazo, who is only visiting Taiwan on this overseas trip.

Durazo said he would like a TSMC chip plant in his state, and that he would be visiting the Hsinchu Science Park, where the chipmaker does much of its manufacturing in Taiwan.

“Assuming as a natural complement of all these processes of relocation of investment in Arizona, we also see TSMC as an obvious option for Sonora state,” he said.

Foxconn and TSMC both declined to comment.

Sonora also boasts major lithium deposits, which Lopez Obrador formally nationalised in Mexico earlier this year.

Mexico has yet to begin production of the metal, which is a key component for EV batteries.

To facilitate production, Durazo underlined that private investors would be able to partner up with the incipient national lithium company LitioMx on the condition they established supply chains in Sonora.

By Reuters | Updated: 26 September 2023

Sept 25 (Reuters) – OpenAI’s ChatGPT is getting a major update that will enable the viral chatbot to have voice conversations with users and interact using images, moving it closer to popular artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like Apple’s (AAPL.O) Siri.

The voice feature “opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications”, OpenAI said in a blog post on Monday.

Similar AI services like Siri, Google (GOOGL.O) voice assistant and Amazon.com’s (AMZN.O) Alexa are integrated with the devices they run on and are often used to set alarms and reminders, and deliver information off the internet.

Since its debut last year, ChatGPT has been adopted by companies for a wide range of tasks from summarizing documents to writing computer code, setting off a race amongst Big Tech companies to launch their own offerings based on generative AI.

ChatGPT’s new voice feature can also narrate bedtime stories, settle debates at the dinner table, and speak out loud text input from users.

The technology behind it is being used by Spotify (SPOT.N) for the platform’s podcasters to translate their content in different languages, OpenAI said.

With images support, users can take pictures of things around them and ask the chatbot to “troubleshoot why your grill won’t start, explore the contents of your fridge to plan a meal, or analyze a complex graph for work-related data”.

Alphabet’s Google Lens is currently the popular choice to gain information on images.

The new ChatGPT features will be released for subscribers of its Plus and Enterprise plans over the next two weeks.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

By Reuters | Updated: 25 September 2023

NEW DELHI, Sept 25 (Reuters) – Apple (AAPL.O) supplier Pegatron on Monday temporarily halted iPhone assembly at its Chennai facility in India’s Tamil Nadu state after a fire at the factory.

Apple has been eyeing a large manufacturing base in India since it began iPhone assembly in the country in 2017.

Apple products in India are currently manufactured through contracts with firms including Foxconn (2317.TW), Wistron Corp (3231.TW) and Pegatron Corp (4938.TW). It has a total of 14 suppliers with facilities in India.

Here’s a look at other incidents when operations were disrupted at Apple facilities in India:

February 2023: Foxlink, which manufactures iPhone chargers, suspended production at its assembly facility in Chittoor in the state of Andhra Pradesh after a fire caused part of the building to collapse.

December 2021: Operations at a plant belonging Foxconn in Tamil Nadu’s Chennai city were halted for more than three weeks after 250 workers fell sick, sparking protests. Apple later found facilities did not meet required standards.

December 2020: Workers at a Wistron plant in Karnataka state’s Narsapura destroyed property during protests over non-payment of wages, causing millions of dollars in losses and forcing the Taiwanese contract manufacturer to shut the plant for three months.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

By Reuters | Updated: 25 September 2023

JAKARTA, Sept 25 (Reuters) – Indonesia may issue on Tuesday a regulation on the use of social media to sell goods in the country, President Joko Widodo said, a move intended to quell threats to offline markets in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy.

Ministers have repeatedly said that e-commerce sellers using predatory pricing on social media platforms are threatening offline markets in Indonesia, with some officials specifically citing the video platform TikTok as an example.

“We just…decided on the use of social media for e-commerce. Tomorrow it will perhaps come out,” Widodo, who is commonly known as Jokowi, said in a streamed video address on Monday.

“What the people are expecting is that the advancement of technology can create new economic potential, not kill existing economies.”

Jokowi did not mention any specific companies or offer further details on the regulation, which is being formulated by the trade ministry.

Current trade regulations do not specifically cover direct transactions on social media.

Deputy Trade Minister Jerry Sambuaga said earlier this month that “social media and social commerce cannot be combined,” vowing to ban the mix of the two and citing TikTok’s “live” features which allow people to sell goods.

A TikTok Indonesia spokesperson declined to comment. TikTok is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance.

The company said that its app had 325 million Southeast Asian users that were active every month, of whom 125 million were in Indonesia. The company has said that there were 2 million small businesses on TikTok Shop in Indonesia.