Foxconn Chairman Young Liu gives a speech at Honghi Tech Day in Taipei on October 18, 2023.
Chen Yihua | AFP | Getty Images
The boom in corporate investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure is still a long way off, as large-scale language models continue to evolve, according to the CEO of . foxconna major supplier to apple.
In an interview with CNBC, Emily Tan, CEO and chairman of Foxconn, said that advanced language models such as OpenAI are becoming more and more intelligent with each new version, and that the AI boom “still has a long way to go.” It takes a lot of money,” he said.
He said the overall trend in the technology industry today is toward AI that is as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, humans. This type of AI is referred to in the industry as “AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence).
“We’ve heard about…AGI, so we talk about different levels of intelligence. [intelligence] It’s divided into four different levels, and we’re currently on level two. We still have Level 3 and Level 4 left,” Liu told CNBC in an interview aired Tuesday.
OpenAI is one of the leading companies driving AGI. Sam Altman, CEO of the Microsoft-backed startup, previously said AGI would be developed in the “fairly near future,” but at the same time said AGI would “not be what we thought it would be.” “I think there will be much less employment change than there would have been,” he said.
The company, which released an upgraded GPT-4o model this summer, revealed last week that it had raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion. OpenAI continues to work towards the release of its next generation LLM, GPT-5, but there is no word yet on when the new language model will be released.
Liu said the progress towards more intelligent AI can only be good for the AI server industry, which has been a big boon for Foxconn’s growth this year.
“I think there is still time for the AI server industry to grow,” Liu added. “As AGI capabilities improve, the era [of] AI devices will also be an industry that we should keep a close eye on. ”
Strong demand for Nvidia’s Blackwell
Foxconn, trading locally in China and Taiwan as Honghai, is the world’s largest contract manufacturer for the electronics industry. The company manufactures and assembles apple This includes two out of three iPhones.
Foxconn said Saturday it reported higher-than-expected sales. The company announced that its sales for the September quarter rose 20.2% year-on-year to NT$1.85 trillion ($57.5 billion). According to Foxconn, this “exceeded the company’s initial expectations for significant growth.”
This strong performance comes on the back of growing demand for the AI servers that Foxconn manufactures for several global tech giants, including: Amazon, google, microsoftand Nvidia.
The company is currently on track to ship servers based on Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPU (graphics processing unit), an advanced AI superchip, in the fourth quarter of 2024, Liu told CNBC. Ta. Blackwell is also known by the brand name GB200.
Asked about the status of orders for Blackwell’s servers, Liu said demand for the chip was “much better than we thought” and that the company is building new products in Mexico to meet the huge demand for the product. He added that he was building a factory.
His comments echo what NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has previously said about demand for Blackwell products. Hwang told CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” last week that the demand for Blackwell is “insane.”
“Everyone wants to have the most, everyone wants to be the best,” Huang said in an interview aired last Wednesday.
Blackwell is expected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit and will be available from OpenAI, Microsoft, meta Other companies are building AI data centers to power products like ChatGPT and Copilot.
AI devices are the next growth opportunity
Foxconn not only develops the IT infrastructure for cloud-based AI applications like ChatGPT, but also builds new iPhones with the latest generative AI capabilities that Apple hopes will breathe new life into the smartphone industry. It also powers 16.
Foxconn’s Liu said “on-device” AI, where data is processed directly on mobile devices rather than in the cloud or on servers, is the company’s next big growth opportunity.
“I think genAI-related devices will be the next vehicle for growth,” Liu told CNBC. “We’re seeing this now on the cloud side. We’re seeing genAI cloud equipment boom very much.”
“But in the next phase, what we’re seeing is going to be Gen AI devices,” he added. “We think this is going to be the next big thing…We have very high expectations for these devices.”
Still, it’s worth noting that Apple has yet to release its AI system, called Apple Intelligence, to the iPhone. The company plans to make Apple Intelligence generally available in beta later this fall as part of a new software update.
After declining for several years in a row, smartphone sales are gaining momentum this year. According to preliminary data from IDC, smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2024 increased by 6.5% year-on-year to 285.4 million units, marking the fourth consecutive quarterly increase.
