TSMC affiliate VIS may expedite production at US$8b Singapore fab
VIS may be able to push production at the new plant, which makes mature chips, to as soon as late 2026 versus the originally announced schedule of the first half of 2027, VIS Chairman Fang Leuh told reporters at a company event on Saturday in Taoyuan, Taiwan. VIS broke ground for the facility in the fourth quarter of 2024.
'Over the past few months many customers have shown greater interest in our new 300-millimeter Singapore plant due to geopolitical uncertainties,' said Fang.
VIS's new plant is a joint venture with Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors NV. While the Taiwanese company does not make the most cutting-edge AI chips, it is a key supplier in making chips for automotive and industrial use.
Both TSMC and VIS are adding capacity outside of their home turf partly due to growing concerns from global chip users over China's persistent threats to unite with self-governing, democratic Taiwan, by force if necessary. But overseas expansion has not always been smooth. TSMC recently said it is pushing back the construction of its second fab in Japan due to worsening traffic conditions in the area.
An NXP executive said last December that the two companies are working on a phase-two expansion of the facility though the plan still needs formal approval. Fang said that VIS is currently focusing on getting the first plant ready and it is not currently considering a second phase yet. The trade war and tariffs have created additional challenges, Fang added, but he still expects VIS to see business grow mildly in US dollar terms year-over-year in the second half. –BLOOMBERG
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Malay Mail
23 minutes ago
- Malay Mail
‘Move from worry to strategy': HR minister says AI puts 600,000 jobs ‘at risk' but creates new ones
GEORGE TOWN, July 28 — The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape Malaysia's job market and could unlock thousands of new employment opportunities, Human Resources Minister Steven Sim said today He said that over 60 emerging job roles have already been identified, with 70 per cent of them in the AI and technology sector, poised to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. 'So we have to move on from what I call 'worry to strategy,' because the way forward is to ensure that our workers are equipped with the right skills to adapt to the changes in current and future economic trends,' Sim said in his speech at the official launch of the 52nd ARTDO International Conference here this morning. Sim referred to a study his ministry commissioned six months ago on the impact of AI and digitalisation in Malaysia, which revealed that 600,000 existing jobs are "at risk." However, he clarified that this does not necessarily mean these jobs will be lost. 'Of course, some of these may become obsolete, so workers in these roles will be required to upskill and reskill,' he said, explaining that "at risk" means the jobs could be significantly impacted or affected by AI. The study collected data from industry players across ten strategic economic sectors that contribute to about 60 to 70 per cent of the nation's GDP. Upskilling and AI literacy key Later, when asked to elaborate, Sim pointed to new roles like "prompt engineers" as examples of emerging opportunities. 'We need to learn how to work with AI. We still need someone to input data into the AI, and someone still needs to check the structures of feedback produced by AI,' he said. He stressed the importance of two key areas for the workforce: High-level AI skills that cover the ability to manage or even create AI Broad AI literacy: Basic understanding and ability to use AI tools, which he said is essential for everyone, including homemakers, as the technology permeates all sectors. 'So we also want to provide basic AI literacy courses to the public in general,' he added, noting that the ministry's MyMahir portal was developed to match new skill requirements with appropriate training courses. Sim also said that AI is not just about technical skills, but involves ethical and legal considerations. He added that clear guidelines are needed to ensure the progress of AI does not negatively impact society. 'AI is not just about technology; it also touches on moral and legal issues.'
Malay Mail
2 hours ago
- Malay Mail
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
Homegrown, Business-Optimized Technology Addresses Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities The Zia Agent studio is now fully prompt-based. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations. SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 28 July 2025 - Zoho Corporation , a global technology company, announced additional investments and offerings in AI, includinga proprietary large language model; Zia Agents , with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace Zia Agent Studio , a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho's latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations."Zia LLM is a unique Enterprise LLM, this investment furthers Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," says Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho APAC. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale. For businesses, AI needs data integration at a DNA level, the Zoho platform is built with exactly that future and vision."Zoho has launched its own large language model,, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform . Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centers in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months. Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia's new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it's building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions. To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management).Agents available today include: AI Agent Studio and Marketplace Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioral audits as well as performance and impact analyses on Digital Employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are:Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization's every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho's developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. Interoperability with MCP Zoho has adopted, offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. Roadmap In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM).Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms. Additional Documentation Disclaimer All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners. Availability and Pricing Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability. Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don't require burdening consumers with additional #zoho The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. About Zoho
New Straits Times
3 hours ago
- New Straits Times
Samsung Elec signs US$16.5bil deal to make chips for global firm
SEOUL: Samsung Electronics said on Monday it has signed a US$16.5 billion deal to supply chips for an unidentified major global company, sending its shares up 3.5 per cent. The South Korean tech giant said the deal signed on Saturday was for contract chip manufacturing and details of the agreement including the counterpart and terms would not be disclosed until the contract is completed at the end of 2033. The deal comes as Samsung is struggling to compete in the race to make artificial intelligence chips, which has hit its profits and share price. Samsung has customers like Tesla and Qualcomm for its foundry business, while bigger rival TSMC has customers like Apple and Nvidia. The deal comes as South Korea is seeking US partnerships in chips and shipbuilding as it is making last-ditch efforts to reach a trade deal to eliminate or cut potential 25 per cenrt US tariffs. It is not clear how the order would affect Samsung's plan to start production at its new factory in Texas, which has been delayed as it had struggled to win major customers. Samsung is grappling to boost production yields of its latest 2-nanometer technology, and the order is unlikely to involve the cutting-edge tech, Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Investment & Securities, said. Samsung has been losing market share to TSMC in contract manufacturing, underscoring technological challenges the firm faces in mastering advanced chip manufacturing to lure the likes of Apple and Nvidia away from TSMC, analysts said.
