TAIPEI (Oct 8): Foxconn is building in Mexico the world's largest manufacturing facility for bundling Nvidia's superchips, a key component of the US firm's next-generation Blackwell family computing platform, senior executives at the Taiwanese company said on Tuesday.
Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer and known as Apple's biggest iPhone assembler, has been benefiting from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, as it assembles servers used to process AI work.
"We are building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet," said Benjamin Ting, Foxconn's senior vice-president for the cloud enterprise solutions business group.
Nvidia said in August that it had started shipping Blackwell samples to its partners and customers after tweaking its design, and expected several billion dollars in revenue from these chips in the fourth quarter.
Ting said the partnership between his company and Nvidia is very important, and everyone is asking for Nvidia's Blackwell platform.
"The demand is awfully huge," Ting said at the company's annual tech day in Taipei, standing next to Nvidia's vice-president for AI and robotics, Deepu Talla.
Speaking to reporters later, Foxconn chairman Young Liu said the plant is being build in Mexico, and that the capacity there would be "very, very enormous". He did not elaborate.
Foxconn already has a large manufacturing presence in Mexico, and has invested more than US$500 million (RM2.14 billion) to date in the state of Chihuahua.
Liu said the company's supply chain is ready for the AI revolution, adding that its manufacturing capabilities include the "advanced liquid cooling and heat dissipation technologies necessary to complement the GB200 server's infrastructure".
He said that the company's outlook in the current quarter is strong, though he did not give details. On Saturday, Foxconn posted its highest-ever revenue for the third quarter on strong demand for AI servers.
Foxconn's other focus is ambitious plans to diversify away from its role of building consumer electronics for Apple, hoping to use its tech know-how to offer electric vehicle (EV) contract manufacturing and also produce vehicles using models built by the Foxtron brand.
Asked about fierce competition in the global EV market amid slowing demand, Liu said Foxconn is committed to the sector.
"It is the right direction, and we will continue to work hard towards that," he said, adding that with EVs, the "engine barrier" no longer exists in car manufacturing.
Automakers "don't need to make the whole car themselves anymore", he said.
Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee