Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn announced Tuesday that it will build a huge factory in Guadalajara, Jalisco, where it will assemble “superchips” for U.S. technology company Nvidia.
Senior Foxconn executives revealed the plan at the company’s annual tech day in Taipei but didn’t disclose some key details such as the amount being invested in the facility or when it will open.
“We’re building the largest GB200 [superchip] production facility on the planet,” said Benjamin Ting, a Foxconn senior vice president.
Nvidia’s GB200 superchips are a key component of the California-based company’s next-generation Blackwell computing platform.
Foxconn chairman Young Liu told reporters, customers and partners that there is “crazy” demand for the Blackwell platform.
Similarly, Ting said that demand is “awfully huge.”
According to Reuters, the senior vice president described the partnership between Foxconn — the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer — and Nvidia as very important.
Financial Times reported that Nvidia’s vice president for AI and robotics, Deepu Talla, also attended the Foxconn event in Taipei but said he “gave few details of the 450m-long plant” in Mexico.
Liu said that the plant is being built in Guadalajara and asserted that its capacity would be “very, very enormous.”
He did not provide further details, Reuters said.
Financial Times said that the construction of “the world’s largest factory” for GB200 superchips is “a stark illustration of how global technology supply chains are decoupling from China,” although the newspaper noted that Foxconn maintains “several massive factory complexes in China, including the world’s largest iPhone plant.”
Mexico is aiming to capitalize on that decoupling, and many companies seeking to shorten their supply chains to the United States market and take advantage of Mexico’s free trade agreement with the world’s largest economy have recently established a presence here or announced their intention to do so.
One sector the federal government hopes will grow significantly in Mexico in the coming years is the semiconductor industry.
Representatives from 20 Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers, including Foxconn, visited Mexico in June 2023 to evaluate the country’s investment potential. Also, a year ago, Mexico and the United States launched a joint “semiconductor action plan” that aims to make North America the world’s “most powerful” chip-producing region.
And earlier this year, the U.S. said it would partner with Mexico in another semiconductor initiative whose ultimate aim is to strengthen and grow the Mexican semiconductor industry.
Foxconn’s announcement on Tuesday came less than two months after the company said it would invest US $241.2 million in Chihuahua to increase its capacity to manufacture artificial intelligence servers.
Reuters reported that Foxconn, which has a plant in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, has already invested $500 million in Chihuahua.
Last year, Foxconn and the government of Chihuahua announced they had formed a “strategic partnership,” which they said would “contribute to the prosperity” of the northern border state and its residents.
According to Reuters, Liu said Tuesday that Foxconn’s supply chain was ready for the AI revolution.
The news agency said that the company’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 EV contract manufacturing and also produce vehicles using models built by [the] Foxtron brand.”
In Mexico, the electric vehicle sector is growing, and the pace of growth looks set to accelerate given that Chinese automaker BYD, the world’s largest EV manufacturer, is planning to open a plant here.
With reports from Reuters and Financial Times
