The Apple’s top iPhone assembler has been expanding beyond electronics into electric vehicles and AI data centres
[TAIPEI] Foxconn said on Friday (Nov 21) that a US$1.4 billion supercomputing centre it is building with Nvidia will be ready by the first half of 2026, and when complete will be Taiwan’s largest advanced GPU cluster.
The 27-megawatt data centre will be powered by Nvidia’s new Blackwell GB300 chips and is also set to be Asia’s first GB300 AI data centre, said Neo Yao, CEO of a new unit Foxconn has established for AI supercomputing and cloud operations called Visonbay.ai.
“As GPU technology accelerates, building individual facilities may no longer make economic sense,” said Alexis Bjorlin, a Nvidia vice-president, at the contract electronics manufacturer’s tech day, which was attended by Foxconn’s partners and clients including Nvidia, OpenAI and Uber.
“Renting compute resources may offer a far better return on investment, enabling flexibility and enabling companies to scale their compute according to both product and business cycles,” she said.
Foxconn, Apple’s top iPhone assembler, has been expanding beyond electronics into electric vehicles and AI data centres. It is now Nvidia’s main maker of AI racks, which are server racks tailored for AI workloads that house chips, cables and other equipment.
This has made the company a big beneficiary of the data centre boom, as cloud computing firms spend billions of US dollars to expand their AI infrastructure and research capacity.
Foxconn offered a bullish outlook on AI-related demand last week, saying it would be a big driver of 2026 growth. Foxconn chairman Young Liu told Reuters in an interview published earlier on Friday before the event that Foxconn would invest US$2 billion to US$3 billion a year in AI.
Foxconn’s founder, Terry Gou, also made an appearance at the tech day as did Spencer Huang, a product line manager at Nvidia’s leading robotics product who is also the son of Nvidia founder Jensen Huang. Huang said that Nvidia was working with Foxconn to bring AI to factories and manufacturing lines.
Liu said the company now had the capability to manufacture 1,000 artificial intelligence racks per week, and it expected that rate to increase next year.
He also said the company’s EV volumes were just at about the level where automakers could outsource more production to Foxconn and chief strategy officer Jun Seki showcased the company’s “Model A” electric vehicle on stage.
Liu said that the Model A was designed by Japanese engineers and that Foxconn planned to eventually set up a company there to serve Japanese customers. The Model A will eventually be made in Japan too, he said. REUTERS
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