(Global, April 25, TMT2024) - Today's highlights: ASML welcomes a new CEO, Biden signs TikTok divestment bill, Xiaomi Auto has delivered 5,781 units, TSMC's "A16" chip process will be mass-produced in 2026, Apple will release OpenELM large language model, and SK hynix will invest 20 trillion won to build a new factory.
ASML has a new CEO
Dutch chip manufacturing giant ASML welcomed a new CEO on April 24, Frenchman Christophe Fouquet. Agence France-Presse reported that he faces a lot of work after taking over ASML, and his first priority will be to handle the company's business in China. At the end of last year, ASML announced that long-time Dutchman Wennink at the helm of the company would retire this year and be replaced by a "veteran" of the company. Born in 1973, Fuquet is a physics major and has been with ASML for 16 years, serving as the company's vice president and chief commercial officer since 2022 and is Wennink's right-hand man.
Biden signs TikTok stripping bill
U.S. President Joe Biden signed a TikTok-related bill that requires ByteDance to divest TikTok within the next nine months to a year or the app will be banned from the U.S. market. TikTok issued a statement saying it would challenge the ban in court. TikTok said, "This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court." We believe that facts and law are clearly on our side and that we will win in the end. In fact, we've invested billions of dollars to keep U.S. data safe and our platform safe from outside influence and manipulation. The ban will destroy 7 million businesses and silence 170 million Americans. ”
Xiaomi Auto has delivered 5,781 units
The 2024 Beijing Auto Show opened, and Xiaomi Auto held a press conference. Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi Group, said that as of April 24, the number of locked orders exceeded 75,723 units, and 5,781 units had been delivered within 28 days of release. Lei Jun previously revealed: It is expected that the gross profit margin of Xiaomi SU7 is roughly between 5% and 10%. At present, the annual budget of Xiaomi's intelligent driving team is about 1.5 billion yuan, and the team size has exceeded 1,000 people. The company plans to expand the team to 1,500 people this year and 2,000 people next year to further increase investment in the field of intelligent driving.
Xiaomi's East China headquarters will be opened in early May
The East China headquarters of Xiaomi Group will be opened in early May, when 5,000 people are expected to settle in the office, and it will become the largest R&D center in China except for Xiaomi's Beijing headquarters. The first phase of Xiaomi's East China headquarters covers an area of 77,000 square meters, which can accommodate 5,000 workstations and 35,000 square meters of apartments. Xiaomi's East China headquarters is expected to recruit 800 people this year, establish East China Software College, and join hands with universities in Jiangsu Province such as China Southern Airlines and Southern Institute of Technology to jointly train employees in demand and connect industry-university-research cooperation. It is expected to reach 5,000 people within three years and strive to exceed 10,000 people in five years.
Tencent released a full-stack capability architecture for the automotive industry
Tencent released the "Global Intelligence" solution for large models in the automotive industry, providing a full-stack large model capability base from models, computing power, AI engineering platforms to AI applications. Tencent is cooperating with more than a dozen auto companies such as Changan, GAC, FAW Toyota, Dongfeng Lantu, and Yiche, and by the end of this year, Tencent's smart car products will be installed in more than 15 million vehicles.
TSMC's "A16" chip process will be mass-produced in 2026
TSMC announced that its new chip-making technology, called "A16", will go into mass production in the second half of 2026, marking another escalation in the battle between TSMC and longtime rival Intel over who will be able to make the world's fastest chip. TSMC executives said AI chip makers could be the first adopters of A16 technology rather than smartphone makers. TSMC also showcased a power supply technology that will be available in 2026 to help accelerate the operation of AI chips by powering the chip from the back of the chip.
Apple releases OpenELM large language model
Apple has released an "efficient language model with an open-source training and inference framework" on the Hugging Face platform called OpenELM. This is an open-source language model, and its source code and pre-trained model weights and training recipes are available in the Apple Github repository. OpenELM uses a hierarchical scaling strategy to effectively allocate parameters for each layer of the Transformer model, thereby improving accuracy. Apple has also released code to convert models into MLX libraries for inference and fine-tuning on Apple devices.
Apple's Vision Pro marketing executive retires
Frank Casanova, now senior director and head of product marketing at Apple's Vision Pro, has announced his retirement after 36 years with the company. In 1997 he became senior director of graphics for Mac OS X, and a decade later he moved to the marketing team to help Apple expand its iPhone business to more carriers around the world. In 2019, he was appointed head of marketing for Apple's augmented reality tools, and subsequently played a key role in the development and launch of the Apple Vision Pro.
UK regulators scrutinize Amazon's and Microsoft's investments in AI companies
Amazon and Microsoft's investments in AI startups will come under more scrutiny from UK antitrust regulators, once again showing how global regulators are trying to adapt to the impact of global tech giants on this market. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Wednesday it was seeking advice from market participants to determine whether the $4 billion partnership between Amazon and artificial intelligence company Anthropic threatened competition in the UK. The CMA also said it is considering Microsoft's partnerships with Mistral and Inflection AI.
Google is unable to opt out of third-party cookies as planned
Google will not be able to achieve its goal of changing the way ads are advertised on the dominant Chrome browser by the end of the year, and the company's years of efforts to improve consumer privacy on the Internet have been frustrated. Google said on Tuesday that it would not be able to remove third-party cookies on the original schedule due to "ongoing challenges in coordinating disparate feedback from industry, regulators and developers." Advertisers have been eagerly awaiting this change, as almost two-thirds of internet traffic flows through Chrome, making it an important gateway to reach consumers.
Oracle headquarters will be relocated again
Oracle has unveiled plans to relocate its headquarters again, this time to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to companies in the healthcare industry. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in an interview hosted live on Tuesday by Oracle Health that the enterprise software company is moving its massive campus to the southern city, where "it will eventually become our global headquarters."
英伟达宣布收购Run:ai
Nvidia announced the acquisition of Run:ai, increasing investment in the latter's product roadmap and integrating related resources into Nvidia DGX Cloud, but has not disclosed the specific acquisition amount and when the acquisition has been completed. Run:AI has been working closely with NVIDIA since 2020. Run: AI's main product is Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software, which can improve GPU utilization, improve GPU infrastructure management, and make open architectures more flexible.
IBM will acquire software company HashiCorp
IBM announced that it will acquire software company HashiCorp for $35 per share in cash, with an enterprise value of $6.4 billion. IBM says HashiCorp has a proven track record of helping customers manage today's complex infrastructure and applications. Combining IBM's product portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp's capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era.
SK hynix will invest KRW 20 trillion to build a new plant
South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix plans to build an advanced memory chip factory in Cheongju, South Korea, to cope with the rapid growth of demand for semiconductors in the development of global AI. The company will start construction of the new plant at the end of April and is expected to be completed by November 2025. The total investment in the construction and equipment of the new plant will exceed 20 trillion won (about 14.6 billion U.S. dollars). As a leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, SK hynix is working hard to maintain its advantage.
Samsung and AMD signed a KRW 4 trillion supply agreement
Samsung and AMD signed a KRW 4 trillion contract for the supply of HBM3E. AMD will purchase Samsung's HBM, and in exchange for Samsung's AI accelerator card, the exact number of exchanges is not yet known. Samsung will mass-produce HBM3E 12H memory in the first half of this year, while AMD expects to start mass production of related AI accelerator cards in the second half of this year.
Meta's first-quarter profit surged 117% year-on-year
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2024. Quarterly revenue was $36.455 billion, compared to $28.645 billion in the same period last year, up 27% year-on-year. The quarterly net profit was US$12.369 billion, compared with US$5.709 billion in the same period last year, up 117% year-on-year. Advertising revenue in the fiscal first quarter was $35.64 billion, up 27% year-over-year.
Texas Instruments' first-quarter revenue was the lowest since 2020
Semiconductor company Texas Instruments (TI) announced financial results for the first quarter of 2024. Quarterly revenue was $3.66 billion, down 16.4% year-over-year and the lowest since 2020. Net profit was $1.11 billion, down 35% year-on-year. Revenues declined across all markets, with industrial revenues down more than single digits and communications equipment revenues down 25 percent.
The average price of displays in China has decreased
According to Lotu Technology's online monitoring data, the average price of China's display online market in the first quarter of 2024 is 1,072 yuan, a decrease of 38 yuan from the same period last year. The mainstream price range is still concentrated in500-1000 yuan, accounting for 47% of the market share, this proportion increased by 5 percentage points over the same period last year, at the same time, display products below 500 yuan can not be ignored, they occupy the second largest share of the market, reaching 19%, which shows that entry-level displays still have a huge market demand.