Foxconn Chairman Liu Yang delivers a speech at Hon Hai Technology Day in Taipei on October 18, 2023.
Zheng Yihua | AFP | Getty Images
The CEO said the corporate investment boom in artificial intelligence infrastructure still has some way to go as large-scale language models continue to evolve. Foxconnmajor suppliers apple.
Foxconn CEO and Chairman Yang Liu said in an interview with CNBC that with the emergence of each new iteration of advanced language models such as OpenAI, the prosperity of artificial intelligence “will still take some time.”
He said the overall trend in today’s technology industry is toward a form of artificial intelligence that is as smart as humans, if not smarter. This type of artificial intelligence is known in the industry as “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence.
“We… heard about AGI, and we will talk about different levels of intelligence. If you divide (intelligence) into four different levels, we are at level two. There is also level three and level four.” Liu Zai told CNBC in an interview aired Tuesday.
OpenAI is one of the leading companies driving AGI. Sam Altman, chief executive of the Microsoft-backed startup, has previously said that AGI will be developed in the “pretty near future,” but also said he thinks “jobs will change more than jobs will change.” We imagined much less.”
The company released an upgraded version of its GPT-4o model this summer and last week revealed it had raised $6.6 billion in funding at a valuation of $157 billion. OpenAI is still working on releasing its next-generation LLM, GPT-5, but has not revealed when the new language model will be available.
Liu said the increasingly smarter advances in artificial intelligence can only be a good thing for the artificial intelligence server industry, which is also a key benefit for Foxconn’s growth this year.
“I think for the AI server industry, we still have some time to grow,” Liu added. “As general artificial intelligence capabilities continue to grow, the era of artificial intelligence devices will be another industry we should pay close attention to.”
Strong demand for Nvidia Blackwell chips
Foxconn, known locally as Hon Hai in mainland China and Taiwan, is the world’s largest contract manufacturer in the electronics industry. The company produces and assembles apple products, including about two-thirds of iPhones.
Foxconn said on Saturday it reported better-than-expected sales figures. The company said revenue in the September quarter was NT$1.85 trillion (US$57.5 billion), an increase of 20.2% year-on-year. Foxconn said this “exceeded the company’s initial expectations for significant growth.”
The strong results were driven by increased demand for artificial intelligence servers, with Foxconn manufacturing servers for several major global tech giants, including Amazon, Google, Microsoftand NVIDIA.
Liu told CNBC that the company currently expects to launch Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPU (graphics processing unit), an advanced artificial intelligence server chip, in the fourth quarter of 2024. Blackwell is also known by the GB200 brand.
Asked about Blackwell’s order, Liu said demand for the wafer was “much better than we thought,” adding that the company was building a new factory in Mexico to help meet the huge demand for the product.
His comments are consistent with previous comments by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about Blackwell’s needs. Last week, Huang told CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” that the demand for Blackwell was “crazy.”
“Everybody wants to have the most, everybody wants to be number one,” Huang said in an interview that aired last Wednesday.
Blackwell estimates the cost per unit to be between $30,000 and $40,000, with input from OpenAI, Microsoft, Yuan and other companies building artificial intelligence data centers to power products such as ChatGPT and Copilot.
Artificial intelligence devices are the next growth opportunity
In addition to producing IT infrastructure for cloud-based AI applications such as ChatGPT, Foxconn is also powering the new iPhone 16, which is equipped with the latest generative AI features that Apple hopes to inject new energy into the smartphone industry. vitality.
Foxconn’s Liu said “on-device” artificial intelligence – where data is processed directly on mobile devices rather than in the cloud or on servers – represents the company’s next real growth opportunity.
“I think genAI related devices will be the next way to grow,” Liu told CNBC. “Right now, we’re seeing this in the cloud. You see, genAI cloud devices are booming.”
“But in the next phase, what we’re going to see is Gen AI devices,” he added. “We think this is going to be the next boom… We have high hopes for these devices.”
However, it is worth noting that Apple has not released an artificial intelligence system called Apple Intelligence on the iPhone. The company expects to release a beta version of Apple Intelligence to the public later this fall as part of a new software update.
After declining for several consecutive years, smartphone sales began to show growth momentum this year. Preliminary data from IDC shows that in the second quarter of 2024, smartphone shipments increased by 6.5% year-on-year to 285.4 million units. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of smartphone shipment growth.
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