Foxconn eyes Japan-made EVs and China's AI evolves

Nikkei Asia

2 days ago

Hello everyone, this is Cissy from Hong Kong.
Monday was a big day for BYD, as it marked the first anniversary of the Chinese EV champion's Thailand factory. It delivered its 90,000th vehicle in Thailand, a D9 MPV from its premium sub-brand Denza, after officially entering the Southeast Asian nation in 2022.
BYD is also set to begin assembling electric vehicles at its new factory in Brazil, its largest overseas market, as early as this month. The company aims to produce 50,000 vehicles there this year, a move designed to reduce reliance on imports as tariffs increase.
BYD has set a total sales target of 5.5 million vehicles for this year. In the first half of this year, the company sold approximately 2.146 million vehicles, achieving nearly 40% of its annual goal. For overseas markets, BYD aims to sell more than 800,000 vehicles in 2025. The company said its overseas sales for the first six months of this year had exceeded 470,000 vehicles.
While BYD is making rapid progress in overseas markets, its Japanese counterpart Nissan has been struggling. It is attempting a comprehensive overhaul while facing persistent challenges that include mounting financial losses and falling sales, particularly in the U.S. and China. The automaker has been cutting jobs and shutting down some factories, as well as shifting its strategy to prioritize profitability over sheer sales numbers.
Just-in-time cooperation?
Amid a sweeping global restructuring that would reduce its final assembly plants from 17 to 10, Nissan Motor appears to have found a potential savior in Foxconn, who is in talks with Nissan to begin producing its own electric vehicles at Nissan's Oppama plant in Yokosuka, one of the automaker's key facilities, write Nikkei's staff writers.
This collaboration could allow Nissan to improve utilization rates at the Oppama site by allocating surplus production lines to Foxconn. It would also help protect jobs, as shutting down the Oppama facility would be costly for the company and its workforce.
Foxconn has been aggressively expanding into electric vehicle manufacturing through a series of joint ventures around the world. In 2024, the company acquired a 50% stake in a chassis subsidiary of German auto parts giant ZF. A joint venture with Nissan is also being considered for the use of the Oppama plant.
Painful spikes
The chief executive of Hitachi Energy has warned that Big Tech's spiking electricity use as it trains artificial intelligence must be reined in by governments in order to maintain stable supplies, writes the Financial Times' Harry Dempsey.
Andreas Schierenbeck, who heads up the world's largest transformer maker, said that no other industry would be allowed as volatile a use of power as the AI sector.
Huge surges in power demand at data centers training AI models, along with a bumpy renewable energy supply, meant "volatility on top of volatility" was making it challenging to keep the lights on, Schierenbeck told the FT.
"AI data centers are very, very different from these office data centers because they really spike up," he said. "If you start your AI algorithm to learn and give them data to digest, they're peaking in seconds and going up to 10 times what they have normally used.
"No user from an industry point of view would be allowed to have this kind of behavior -- if you want to start a smelter, you have to call the utility ahead," Schierenbeck added, while advocating for data centers to have similar rules applied to them by governments.
AI's next generation
The "DeepSeek moment" has revived investors' appetite for Chinese tech stocks, which had languished since Beijing's crackdown on the once-glittering sector. But some of the latest AI darlings, such as Manus, look to distance themselves from China in a bid to expand overseas, writes Nikkei Asia's Cissy Zhou.
Since its sudden rise to fame, Manus has quietly moved its headquarters to Singapore and has started to aggressively recruit local talent this month, while at the same time laying off more than half of its employees in China, except some key AI engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes as the startup seeks international investment in the face of U.S. restrictions on funding Chinese AI companies.
More broadly, China's appetite for AI-driven capital expenditure remains robust, despite Washington's restrictions on shipments of Nvidia's H20 chips, according to research by Jefferies. The investment bank said China has built up sufficient chip inventories to sustain data center growth at least through the first half of 2026.
Supercharged ambitions
V-GREEN, the company that runs charging stations for VinFast's electric cars and bikes, aims to expand its network in its home market of Vietnam more than sixfold to 1 million ports in three years, write Nikkei's Yuji Nitta and Mai Nguyen.
The target highlights automaker VinFast's ambitious targets for its home country, where government officials are slowly rolling out policies to support electric vehicle adoption. The automaker sold nearly 90,000 vehicles in Vietnam last year and aims to at least double that figure this year.
V-GREEN has also recently expanded to the Philippines and Indonesia, though the company says it is facing challenges in terms of technical standards, regulatory frameworks and legal procedures in overseas markets.
Japan reboots its robot vision as humanoid era fails to deliver
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In this episode, Akito speaks with Tokyo correspondent Ryohtaroh Satoh about how Japan's labor shortages and lagging productivity have led the country's robotics industry to favor practical service robots over flashy humanoid models.
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