Labour taz
Labor dispute in the chip industry: Micron averts microchip shortage
The US manufacturer reaches an agreement with the union at its production site in Taiwan. The AI boom in particular depends on chips manufactured there. more...
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rtr | An impending exacerbation of the global chip shortage has been averted for the time being: the US manufacturer Micron has reached an agreement with an important union in Taiwan. Both sides reached an agreement on the important Taichung site on Wednesday. They then withdrew from an arbitration hearing scheduled for Thursday, they said in a joint statement. Nothing was initially known about the contents of the agreement.
Any disruption to production at Micron in Taiwan could have affected already strained global supply chains for memory chips. The company, based in Idaho, is the third largest memory chip manufacturer in the world. Taiwan is a central production location where the company with around 15,000 employees produces, among other things, DRAM and HBM chips for artificial intelligence (AI) servers. The AI boom has recently driven strong demand for products from chip manufacturers such as Micron, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. However, this also led to demands from the workforce for a greater share of the profits.
The HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory) chips manufactured in Taiwan are particularly crucial for the AI boom. These high-performance memory devices enable rapid processing of the massive amounts of data required to train and operate AI models. Along with SK Hynix and Samsung, Micron is one of the world's leading manufacturers of these technologically sophisticated components.
The agreement now reached affects the union in Taichung, the largest Micron location in Taiwan. However, a one-day warning strike by another union at the Taoyuan site is still planned for Thursday. It's about bonuses and profit sharing. It was unclear whether this strike would now take place after the agreement in Taichung. A statement from the Taoyuan union was initially not available.
The unbroken demand for AI technology is bringing record orders to Taiwan's export economy. Orders increased by 62.4 percent in September compared to the same month last year and reached a new record of $114.21 billion, as the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taipei announced. The order books of Taiwanese companies, which include the world's largest chip contract manufacturer TSMC, are considered an important early indicator of global demand for technology.