GlobalFoundries anticipates its $4 billion enlarged manufacture plant in Singapore to satisfy the "expansion in necessity for basic semiconductor chips.""Car appears to be remaining solid. Cloud for synthetic intelligence appears to be solid. Industrial is remaining there. Anything customer related is still weak," Thomas Caulfield, leader and CEO of GlobalFoundries, told CNBC.The firm specified that the 23,000-square meter fab could create approximately 1,000 "high-esteem" jobs in Singapore.
On Tuesday, U.S.-headquartered GlobalFoundries announced the launch of its $4 billion fabrication plant expansion in Singapore, due to the anticipated growth in demand for semiconductor chips. Thomas Caulfield, president and CEO of GlobalFoundries, told CNBC in an interview prior to the opening that he expects the industry to double in the next decade because of the introduction of new applications such as AI, as well as robust automotive and cloud/AI/industrial sectors. Despite weak consumer demand, the company provides semiconductors to around 200 customers globally, and these are used in a range of products ranging from smartphones and cars to virtual reality systems and smart speakers, and are essential to AI and 5G. Singapore is presently responsible for 11% of the world's semiconductors, per the Singapore Semiconductor Industry Association.
Ranked third in the world for revenue, GlobalFoundries is expanding its global footprint with a 23,000-square-meter fab facility in Singapore. This will give the company the capacity to produce up to 1.5 million 300mm wafers annually, an increase of 450,000 from its current 720,000 wafers (300mm). Additionally, the facility in Singapore produces 692,000 200mm wafers annually, which are the building blocks of chips. After GlobalFoundries acquired Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in 2010, they have had the capability of providing customers on three continents with this production capacity.
GlobalFoundries announced in June 2021 it was building a new fab on its existing Singapore campus in partnership with the city-state's Economic Development Board. This move was meant to address global demand for semiconductor chips. The facility is expected to create around 1,000 "high-value" jobs, 95% of which will involve equipment technicians, process technicians, and engineers. GlobalFoundries currently has around 4,500 employees working at the Singapore site. In June, the Nasdaq-listed semiconductor manufacturer stated that the first tool had been moved into the Singapore facility. With also having manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Germany, GlobalFoundries has held a long-standing partnership with the Singapore government. Executives overseeing the project explained that Singapore has industrial policies that wish to bring high tech manufacturing and innovation to the region, which is why several companies have operations in the country. The expansion has also implemented AI tools such as wafer pattern recognition to automatically classify and spot defects in wafers to increase productivity.
Smartphone and PC manufacturers are currently facing an excess of memory chips, which were stockpiled due to the pandemic-induced rise in demand. As inflation has increased, consumers have been reducing their spending on these products and in turn, the cost of memory chips has decreased. This has had an obvious effect on the profit of companies such as TSMC and Samsung in the second quarter, as there was a continued weak demand for memory chips. Caulfield observed that despite this, the stockpiles of memory chips further down the supply chain have begun to go down. He did point out though that in order for the global inflation to stay relaxed, interest rates must decrease and spending by consumers must recover, particular in China.
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