Hon Hai says company becoming largest producer of GB200 AI servers

Taipei, Oct. 8 (CNA) Taiwan-based manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. said on Tuesday that it is becoming the world's largest producer of GB200 NVL 72 servers, powered by Nvdia Corp.'s advanced Blackwell graphics processing units thanks to its new Mexican site.

Speaking at a technology dialogue of the first day of Hon Hai's two-day Tech Day event in Taipei, Ting Chao-pang (丁肇邦), president of Hon Hai's cloud solution subsidiary Ingrasys Technology Inc., said demand for the Blackwell GPUs has been robust.

Ting's comments echoed those of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) who said in an interview with CNBC last week that demand for Blackwell chips is "insane."

"Everyone wants the most, and everyone wants to be first," Huang added.

In response to this growing demand for this technology crucial for artificial technology (AI) applications, iPhone assembler Hon Hai -- also known as Foxconn internationally -- is currently building up its production capacity to become the world's largest manufacturer of GB200 servers, Ting said.

According to Nvidia, the GB200 platform -- a liquid-cooled, rack-scale server -- is a state-of-the-art data center platform optimized for AI and accelerated computing.

In the dialogue with Ting, Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Embedded & Edge Computing at Nvidia, disclosed that GB200 servers are under production at Hon Hai's plant in Mexico.

Talla's comments confirmed earlier speculation that Hon Hai was expanding AI server production in the central American country after the company announced in February that it acquired a 421,600 square-meter plot of land in El Salto, Mexico's Jalisco State, for more than US$26 million.

In a speech at the Tech Day event, Hon Hai Chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) also said Hon Hai will become the first company in the world to ship GB200 servers from its largest GB200 server production base in Mexico.

In addition, Liu said that Hon Hai is working with Nvidia to build the largest supercomputer in Taiwan named "Hon Hai Kaohsiung Super Computing Center," which will be constructed around the Blackwell architecture and feature GB200 servers.

Nvidia said construction has started on the new supercomputer with the first phase expected to be operational by mid-2025 and full deployment slated for 2026.

Liu said that, apart from GPUs and Central Processing Units (CPUs), Hon Hai is able to provide 80-90 percent of critical components for GB200 AI server production so there are limited concerns about any potential bottleneck issues in the supply chain.

Under such circumstances, Liu said that "AI server sovereignty" -- referring to a nation's capacity to produce AI servers using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks -- is being established in Taiwan.

Hon Hai's sales of AI servers in the first half of 2024 grew more than 200 percent from the first six months of the previous year, and growth momentum is expected to continue accelerating in the second half of this year.

Also on the first day of the Tech Day event, Hon Hai unveiled two new Electric Vehicle (EV) models: the Model D, a hybrid utility vehicle (SUV) and Multi-Purpose Vehicle (MPV), and the Model U, a mid-sized bus.

The second day of the Tech Day event will be held on Wednesday and will be open to the public.