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Foxconn Plant Championed By Trump Lands Google Server Contract (bloomberg.com) 65

Posted by BeauHD from the under-utilized-plants dept.
Foxconn plans to assemble key components for Google servers from its plant in Wisconsin, people familiar with the matter said, finally breathing life into a factory Donald Trump hailed as crucial to bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Bloomberg reports: The Taiwanese company has decided to locate production for this new contract at the existing complex rather than make the components at home or in China, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive move. The under-utilized factory should start mass production in the first quarter, timed with the release of Intel Corp.'s Ice Lake server chips, they said. Foxconn is setting up surface-mount technology assembly lines that it will use to place semiconductors onto circuit boards, they added. A Foxconn representative confirmed it's developing data center infrastructure and high-performance computing "capabilities" in Wisconsin, but declined to name any customers.

Taiwan counts Washington as an essential diplomatic, economic and military ally amid rising tensions with Beijing. Foxconn, which operates most of its factories in central and southern China, won Google's business because it was the only contract manufacturer capable of establishing a surface-mount technology line on American soil, one of the people said. Shanghai-listed Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., its cloud business unit, will oversee the server business in Wisconsin, another person familiar with Foxconn's operations said.
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Foxconn Plant Championed By Trump Lands Google Server Contract More

Foxconn Plant Championed By Trump Lands Google Server Contract

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  • intel??? when AMD is kicking ass and getting replaced by AMD in the DC.

    • For a data center, where cycles-per-watt is the most important measure, they should be going with high-core ARMs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        There are server ARM chips but they are not all that popular yet. Part of the issue is compatibility, especially on the driver front, but also immature management tech (Intel Management Engine is actually useful) and most critically inferior virtualization support.

        Cycles per watt isn't everything, especially when you need more support hardware because of lower per-server performance.

      • Google sells cloud services on their servers. They don't know whether you need CPU or not until you use it and they bill you. Some of Google's own projects also use plenty of CPU. It makes sense for Google to have CPU.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

        For a data center, where cycles-per-watt is the most important measure, they should be going with high-core ARMs.

        No, more important is energy per computation. For some things, ARM will do well, for others, not so well, e.g. lots of floating point matrix operations, especially where code has been optimised over years for Intel chips. For ML you might want to go with GPGPUs or TPUs.. Density may be more important if space is at a premium (e.g. HFT where there may be limited space close to an exchange). Long story short - horses for courses.

  • Servers, huh? Those are some great manufacturing jobs you brought to Wisconsin, Trump! I guess it will create some jobs in IT. Not exactly as promised.

    • A job is a job. An IT job is just as good as a manufacturing job. Perhaps better, since the skillset is more adaptable.

      • Not always. If government incentives for a 100K/yr job are 1M, then it would be substantially less expensive for the gov to create a make work job and save the money. From what I understand, it is about that crazy for the Wis Foxconn plant.
        • Isn't it amazing what you can achieve with a pot of grey paint though? The white elephant in Wisconsin, for example, now looks a lot like a standard elephant.

    • Re:Servers? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @07:04PM (#60759580) Homepage Journal

      Unless I'm mistaken, they're not building a data center, they're producing servers, so it's manufacturing jobs.

      The business outlook at present sucks for just about everything, so under the circumstances this is a very good result. And it's much more credible than the idea that Foxconn would build something like the iPhone in the US. That was always a political pipe dream; an iPhone is something that is tangible to the average person, but it never made sense. Such things are made by armies of poor, nimble-fingered country girls living in barracks and working in sweatshop conditions. The idea that Foxconn would move significant production from a place like that to a facility staffed with US workers was always ludicrous.

      • Unless I'm mistaken, they're not building a data center, they're producing servers, so it's manufacturing jobs.
        The business outlook at present sucks for just about everything, so under the circumstances this is a very good result.

        It's going to produce a couple of dozen jobs, maybe, when it was supposed to produce a shitload. And the cost-to-the-people doesn't justify it. So no, this is a very shit result, it's just very slightly less shit than having it do nothing.

        • Unless I'm mistaken, they're not building a data center, they're producing servers, so it's manufacturing jobs. The business outlook at present sucks for just about everything, so under the circumstances this is a very good result.

          It's going to produce a couple of dozen jobs, maybe, when it was supposed to produce a shitload. And the cost-to-the-people doesn't justify it. So no, this is a very shit result, it's just very slightly less shit than having it do nothing.

          Maybe it'll be successful and expand. Or not. Depends on whether it can be competitive. There are some advantages to being on-shore, better communications, faster change turnarounds, perhaps build-to-order with next-day delivery, etc. But, fundamentally, if something can be done just as well and more cheaply offshore, that's where it's going to be done, and that's where it ought to be done, to provide maximum benefit to the human race as a whole.

          • Nobody is moving manufacturing offshore, although the Japanese have moved recycling there. The word you want is overseas.

            However, everywhere is somewhere else's overseas. So ultimately unless we are moving it into space, all we are doing is changing where the pollution is produced, and who suffers most from it.

      • So what makes us better than those dirty, backwards, uneducated peasant girls? Why do we deserve more human rights protection than them? If we're so cynical that we're willing give the contract to lowest bidder who achieves their cost savings through human exploitation, then we deserve to be imprisoned in sweatshops too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ddtmm ( 549094 )
      You sound like you believed in what he was promising. Go back to sleep old man.

  • 1 down, 9999 to go...

  • Four people (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @06:57PM (#60759554)
    per shift. That's the number of people who manufacture PS5s in Japan. The boards and case components are made by about the same number in China. 2 people feed the boards & case parts in one side and 2 people take finished PS5s off the line and put them in a box. The machines can't quiet do that yet.

    Just sayin', manufacturing isn't coming back, at least not for computer hardware of any kind.

    • Re:Four people (Score:4, Funny)

      by Known Nutter ( 988758 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @08:30PM (#60759826)
      Four people per shift. Okay fine, that's 12, but you're forgetting about the 24 people needed to manage them. And 5 janitors.

      12 + 24 + 5 = 5,000 new jerbs created! Bam! That's how job creation in America is done. Trump!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ddtmm ( 549094 )
      Exactly. All those assembly line jobs are gone for good, and will be in Asia soon as well. It still boggles my mind that there are some folks in PA that thought coal mining was gong to kickstart their economy. Although the writing is on the wall, not everyone can read. Maybe 'Merica should fix that first.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rhipf ( 525263 )

        Assembly line jobs may be going to Asia in the short term but long term almost all assembly will be automated (will still probably be in Asia but could be moved almost anywhere at that point). Manual assembly will mostly be limited to specialty/luxury items that people will be willing to pay the extra cost for.

      • but thing is, when you had Hilary literally saying "I'm going to put a lot of coal miners out of work" most people hear that and think "She's coming for my job next!".

        She was literally the worst candidate in history. Worse, she knew she was. She spent 8 years destroying the Democratic Party so that she wouldn't face a credible challenger. That fact that a 70 year old socialist in a rumbled suit gave her a run for her money on the national stage shows how awful she truly was.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      It's not just electronics too. Non-electronics as well. :(

      • that went out of business. They made over 1 million bags a year... with 120 employees total. I don't mean 120 line workers either. 120 janitors, engineers, marketers and sales people and a few line workers.

        We're not prepared as a society for the amount of labor we're replacing at the speed we're replacing it. We're literally going from "if you don't work, you don't eat" to "completely superfluous population" in about 100 years. There are still plenty alive that grew up in a time of labor shortages.

  • They know that those assets are actually a liability that China can close down at any time.

    So do the brain work in Taiwan, and the grunt work in the USA. Not that much difference in labor costs. Builds relationships. And if there is ever a war with China it is good to have assets elsewhere.

  • Thanks Google (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Walker and Trump gave Foxconn billions in tax credits and then bent over backwards to let Foxconn have their way with them. Nothing of any significance ever got built or ever was going to get built.

    "Foxconn ... won Google's business because it was the only contract manufacturer capable of establishing a surface-mount technology line on American soil"

    Instead of offering up billions in concessions, Google simply refused to do business with them unless the manufacturing was in the US. Now Foxconn can suddenl

  • No USA SMD capability at all? (Score:3)

    by UBfusion ( 1303959 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:31PM (#60760264)

    I am intrigued by the statement that Foxconn is the "only contract manufacturer capable of establishing a surface-mount technology line on American soil". Does this imply that there are no SMD-capable production lines in the US whatsoever, or that there are none big enough or specialised enough to produce server motherboards? The former would imply that all printed circuit boards (which are the guts of all electronic devices) are manufactured outside the US, which I find hard to believe.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      Does this imply that there are no SMD-capable production lines in the US whatsoever, or that there are none big enough or specialised enough to produce server motherboards? The former would imply that all printed circuit boards (which are the guts of all electronic devices) are manufactured outside the US, which I find hard to believe.

      I deal with PCBs as a standard part of my job. Some are so simple I could have cut them myself from copper-clad; others are as complicated as computer motherboards. My com

      • Plexus Services Corporation (in Wisconsin no less) is a company that offers some fairly advanced production services to third parties. They have built things for companies like GE Medical Systems, IBM, ABB, Ford, et al. ranging from simple PTH to advanced SMD.
    • Yeah, I thought the same thing. My company uses Benchmark (among others) for several contract manufacturing jobs including several in their US based factories. https://www.bench.com/worldwid... [bench.com] They seem perfectly capable of doing work like this already.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I am intrigued by the statement that Foxconn is the "only contract manufacturer capable of establishing a surface-mount technology line on American soil". Does this imply that there are no SMD-capable production lines in the US whatsoever, or that there are none big enough or specialised enough to produce server motherboards? The former would imply that all printed circuit boards (which are the guts of all electronic devices) are manufactured outside the US, which I find hard to believe.

      No, there are plenty

  • $3 Billion Subsidy (Score:3, Informative)

    by brit74 ( 831798 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @12:28AM (#60760360)
    This is the same factory where Wisconsin was giving them $3 billion in subsidies? Yeah, I remember that screwy deal. The Americans who put it together gave Foxconn a sweetheart deal because they couldn't do math, and so they gave them massive subsidies that didn't even make economic sense for Wisconsin. And that's why they won the contract for the new manufacturing plant. Of course, Trump took credit for it, because he knows it looks good to voters, even though Wisconsin taxpayers will end up in the hole because of the deal.

  • The under-utilized factory should start mass production in the first quarter, timed with the release of Intel Corp.'s Ice Lake server chips, they said. Foxconn is setting up surface-mount technology assembly lines that it will use to place semiconductors onto circuit boards, they added.

    When did they start shipping equipment and hiring people for this plant for mass production to start in a few months? It does not require cleanroom level support equipment but it does require equipment.

  • Funny how this happened just as Foxconn was staring at the loss of tax subsidies. Anyone want to bet that, like the other initiatives, this will become vaporware after they get paid?

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