Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 435 Zhihai Garden

Xu Shenxue would naturally not turn away the visit of one of the bosses of Gugou, a major client, in person.

Although some of his companies compete and conflict with Google, the relationships between large companies are extremely complex.

There are conflicts and competition in some businesses.

At the same time, we are cooperating in another part of the business.

This is all perfectly normal.

The same is true of the relationship between Google and Xu Shenxue's companies. The two sides are competing in the fields of artificial intelligence and driverless cars.

At the same time, the social platform owned by Google is also competing with the Jump Video owned by Yihai Technology, and the competition is very fierce, extending from the social platform to a series of other network services.

The competition in the Internet field is quite interesting. Although everyone’s products are different, what they are fighting for is the same: user usage time!
The number of people is limited, and the time they spend using online platforms is also limited. However, the time these people spend on the Internet can bring traffic, data, advertising, power grid conversions, games, etc. to the platform.

The length of time users spend on the platform is the core issue that every Internet company is competing for.

A simple example is that if people start watching short videos, then they will naturally have less time to watch TV dramas, play games, and read novels... This will bring about changes in traffic, and traffic in turn affects advertising revenue, power grid conversion revenue, game conversion revenue, and so on.

Yihai Technology's large-scale overseas expansion and its reliance on its core product, Jump Video, to conquer the world and predatory grab the usage time of users have naturally affected the user usage market of the core products of Google, Facebook and some domestic Internet companies, and thus affected the profits of these Internet companies.

Therefore, in the Internet field, the competition between Google and Yihai Technology is still quite fierce.

However, among the many companies under Xu Shenxue, some businesses maintain cooperative relationships with Google, and some even have strategic alliances.

Especially on the Android open source platform and even the entire Android ecosystem, the two parties are directly bound together in a strategic alliance. The Android open source version was jointly developed by the two companies many years ago.

After so many years of cooperation, the open source version of Android cannot do without these two companies... Without either of them, it would be impossible to continue the subsequent development of the open source version of Android.

God knows how many hidden mines the engineers on both sides have buried in the open source version of Android over the past few years...

In addition, the three major mobile phone brands under Xu Shenxue, including Zhiyun mobile phone, Wecool mobile phone, and the overseas version of Xiaolan mobile phone, are also strategic partners of Google. For many years, they have been equipped with many of Google's services, providing the most core traffic source for Google.

To this end, Google needs to pay huge internal fees to Zhiyun Mall Technology Co., Ltd. every year.

In the emerging field of artificial intelligence, although Gugou has always been the biggest challenger of Zhiyun Group, it is also the largest purchasing customer of APO graphics cards under Zhiyun Group.

Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether Xu Shenxue's companies are friends or foes with Google...

Another similar relationship is with the fruit industry... Although the fruit industry and Zhiyun Group seem to be fighting each other, they actually have a lot of cooperation.

Yihai Technology, owned by Xu Shenxue, and many Internet services under Zhiyun Software, also have access to fruit channels, paying a considerable fee to fruit companies every year to obtain traffic support.

Yun AI, the most dazzling artificial intelligence application product released by Zhiyun Group this year, has also been at the top of the list of new APP downloads in the fruit channel for a long time.

The overlap of common supply chains for hardware products is also very high... Zhiyun phones and Fruit phones are both high-end phones, and the various components they use are all top-level components, and there are very limited suppliers worldwide that can provide such components.

For example, OLED screens, the Zhiyun S series of mobile phones and the new mobile phones released by Fruit this year all use screens from Huaxing Technology and Sixing... These two major screen suppliers also supply high-end OLEDs for the Fruit X and Zhiyun S series of mobile phones.

At the same time, some of Fruit's memory chips and flash memory chips are also produced by Zhiyun Storage Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Zhiyun Group.

The two parties also negotiated on cooperation in the field of communication baseband, but ultimately failed to reach an agreement due to price issues. Finally, Intel intervened and snatched away Apple's communication baseband order.

This made Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor in the communication baseband field very unhappy.

So, starting this year, Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor have simultaneously started to attack Intel's communication baseband business... They have specifically released a low-priced single-hanging 4G full network baseband, while strictly controlling the patent licensing of various communication basebands.

Delay will hit Intel's communication baseband business!

The communication baseband and mobile phone SOC businesses are the lifeblood of Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor. How can they tolerate Intel's interference... So Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor were fighting each other in the SOC field, but then they started to attack Intel's communication baseband business together.

In the past year, the two companies have simultaneously poached large numbers of people from Intel's communication baseband business department, poaching the core backbones of the communication baseband R&D department that Intel had worked so hard to build. Only a bunch of misfits are left in the core project team, which ultimately led to poor performance of the communication baseband they produced.

This is also one of the reasons why the poor communication baseband signal was exposed after Apple started using Intel's communication baseband in some non-CDMA2000 models this year.

You see... in the field of communication baseband, Zhiyun Group has even teamed up with Qualcomm. Who can you go to for justice?

But the effect... Look, this year has not even come to an end yet, and Fruit has approached Zhiyun Group and Qualcomm for separate negotiations.

Of course, Apple is also preparing to develop its own communication baseband.

However, developing a communication baseband on your own is extremely difficult...there are many patent restrictions.

Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor are two super-large patent trolls who are shameless and tough in the field of communication baseband... For example, don't even think about the patent of CDMA2000.

Globally, only Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor own the patent for this technology. The communication basebands of Intel, MediaTek, Warwick, Spreadtrum and other companies do not have CDMA2000 mode.

At the same time, Intel and MediaTek do not have TD-LTE, a domestic-exclusive 4G mode... Most of the patents for this technology are in the hands of Zhiyun Semiconductor, and Zhiyun Group has very strict control over the patents for this technology.

Domestic companies such as Huawei and Spreadtrum still relied on their early technological accumulation and obtained complete TD-LTE patents through patent exchange agreements, but their patents can only be used for their own use and cannot be licensed to others.

Qualcomm, on the other hand, developed its own TD-LTE model. Their technology is indeed amazing. They managed to bypass some of Zhiyun Semiconductor's patent restrictions, and finally took out some other communication baseband patents for patent exchange with Zhiyun Semiconductor.

Therefore, Zhiyun Semiconductor and Qualcomm reached a settlement on patents in the fields of communication basebands such as TD-LTE and FDD-LTE-CDMA2000. The two parties conducted certain patent exchanges and each improved their patent pool to produce better all-network communication basebands.

As for Intel, unless it takes out a series of patents of the X86 instruction set to exchange patents with Zhiyun Semiconductor, it will never be able to obtain Zhiyun Semiconductor's patent certificates in the TD-LTE field.

This also led to Intel's communication baseband, which lacked the two modes of CDMA2000 and TD-LTE.

By the way, MediaTek’s communication baseband also lacks the above two modes.

However, the communication basebands of Warwick and Spreadtrum lack the CDMA2000 mode.

Globally, there are still only two companies that can produce full-network communication basebands: Qualcomm and Zhiyun Semiconductor.

Starting this year, Apple has begun to use Intel's communication baseband in some of its models, but the signal is not good and it is only limited to some modes and cannot achieve full network access.

If fruit companies want to develop their own communication basebands in the future, they will encounter similar problems.

For fruit companies, communication baseband is their pain point...they are being strangled.

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Relatively speaking, there is more cooperation than competition between Google and the companies under Xu Shenxue, especially in recent years, Google has purchased a large number of APO graphics cards from Zhiyun Group.

The company is the largest overseas customer of APO graphics cards under Zhiyun Group.

So in response to Sergei's visit, Xu Shenxue personally hosted a banquet for him, and the reception was held in the "Zhi Hai Yuan" where his family had just moved into this year.

Zhihaiyuan’s name is taken from the “Zhi” in Zhiyun Group and the “Hai” in Hailan Automobile, Haiwan Technology and Yihai Technology.

This is a villa community that Xu Shenxue started to select and build two years ago. It took more than a year to complete the construction and subsequent decoration and landscaping. Xu Shenxue and his family just moved in in April this year.

Previously, Xu Shenxue and his family lived in a villa they purchased before getting married. Although the house was nice, it was less than ten minutes away from Lin Yaxian’s parents’ home.

For ordinary wealthy people, even those with hundreds of billions or even trillions of wealth, this is enough... A villa in this community now costs several hundred million.

However, as Xu Shenxue's importance gradually increased, the security threats faced by him and his family became greater and greater... Especially when Xu Shenxue was fighting with the American consortium in the past two years, the situation was quite critical.

Therefore, Xu Shenxue's family is not suitable to continue living in this kind of public villa community, even though the residents of this kind of villa community are either rich or noble, and there are very few outsiders... but few does not mean none.

The security department under Xu Shenxue encountered great difficulty in carrying out security business, so the security department had long suggested Xu Shenxue to move... Boss, living here is no different from wandering around in the downtown area... God knows when someone disguised as a property staff or other villa owner will come out, take out an AK, and fire a volley of bullets!

Don't think that this kind of thing won't happen... In fact, people on the secret front will capture a few similar hostile actors every year... They are all here to kill Xu Shenxue.

Not to mention gadgets like AK, even rocket launchers, explosives, remote-controlled machine guns and the like have been seized during the search.

The secret agency even discovered a remote-controlled machine gun in an operation two years ago. After interrogation, it was discovered that these enemy personnel planned to install a remote-controlled machine gun on a pickup truck on the road where Xu Shenxue's convoy often traveled, park the truck in a roadside parking space, and wait for Xu Shenxue's convoy to pass by, and then issue orders to shoot through satellite commands.

In order to penetrate the armor plates and bulletproof glass on the bulletproof vehicle that Xu Shenxue was riding in, this machine gun is a large-caliber anti-material machine gun with a caliber of 12.7 mm!
The reason why Xu Shenxue is still alive today is not because no one has tried to attack him, nor because he is lucky, but because there are a large number of people inside and outside the company who are responsible for protecting his safety.

Xu Shenxue's private security department and the secret agency front were under great pressure in the past few years...

Because at that time, Xu Shenxue was fighting with several American consortiums over the semiconductor and smart terminal businesses, and the fight was very fierce.

The Galaxy Security under Xu Shenxue went to the United States in groups to cause trouble.

Similar operatives from the opposing consortium also flocked to China, especially to Shenzhen.

Because the incident was so serious, many people from other financial groups were scared and hid at home, and the security force was greatly increased. At the same time, because the incident was so serious on both sides, even though many people tacitly covered it up, it was almost known to the public. Once the public knows about this kind of thing, the impact will be very bad.

They were all a small group of the top people on earth, but they ended up fighting like street thugs and using heavy weapons to bomb people. It was very disgraceful... and it was easy to scare ordinary people. In addition, the competition in the smart terminal field and the semiconductor field was already a done deal, so the two sides finally reached a settlement...

However, even though a settlement had been reached, Xu Shenxue's security was not relaxed and was even tighter than before.

It was also at that time that Xu Shenxue had the idea of ​​finding a place to build a manor to live in... To be precise, it was not he who proposed it, but the security department.

Not only the security department, but even the person in charge of the secret front outside has asked several times in a tactful way whether Boss Xu can move to another place.

You, Xu Shenxue, are such an important target, but living in this kind of public villa community, what's the difference between this and wandering around in a downtown area?
In order to solve the problem of accommodation safety, Xu Shenxue bought a piece of land and asked one of his subsidiaries to develop a villa community, which is Zhihaiyuan.

It is said to be a commercially developed villa community, but in fact the more than 20 villas in it are not for sale to the public.

The largest villa in the middle is where Xu Shenxue and Lin Yaxian live. There are seven or eight villas around it where Xu Shenxue's sister and mother live. In addition, Secretary Li and other women live here with their children.

There is also a circle of villas on the periphery, which are allocated to some of the core scientists with high levels who also require high-level security, as well as several managers at the senior vice president level, such as Gu Zhiming, Ji Chenghe, and Professor Lin Anton, the chief scientist of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute at the W14 level.

In order to better protect them, these people sometimes face some high-level security threats, especially several core scientists, such as Professor Lin Anton... I don’t know how many people outside want to kill him.

The property management of the entire villa is under the responsibility of the logistics department of Liuhe Investment under Xu Shenxue, and all staff members need to pass multiple levels of review by the security department.

As for security work, it is naturally the responsibility of the security department.

The entire Zhihai Park is equipped with all kinds of advanced security equipment, including small phased array radars for drones, infrared equipment, electronic jamming equipment, infrared cameras, etc.

Of course, outsiders don’t know the details of Zhihaiyuan. There is not even any information about this villa community on the public network. Only people nearby know that there is a very mysterious villa community nearby, but it is hard to explain how mysterious it is. Anyway, no one can get close to it.

Xu Shenxue hosted a banquet for Sergei in Zhihai Garden.

This is the first time that Zhihaiyuan has welcomed external guests.

After the banquet, Xu Shenxue and Sergey had a conversation, mainly discussing cooperation on APO graphics cards.

Sergey's purpose of coming here is simple, that is, he wants to get enough APO graphics cards, especially the latest APO4600 graphics card.
Their Google company has a huge demand for APO graphics cards. They asked for 300,000 pieces and hoped to have them delivered within a year.

In response to Sergey's request, Xu Shenxue discussed with his subordinates in Zhiyun Semiconductor and agreed!

Although the order for 4600 APO3 graphics cards has high production capacity requirements, Zhiyun Microelectronics' 3D packaging capacity is continuing to increase, and it is expected that by the middle of next year, the D packaging capacity will be increased to pieces per month (equivalent to eight-inch silicon wafers).

In addition to meeting self-use, this production capacity can also provide enough capacity to supply core customers at home and abroad.

As long as the production capacity of APO graphics cards is sufficient, these core customers will be able to purchase them...even if they have to wait in line.

But it should be enough to allay their concerns and prevent them from going to AMD.

Although AMD's server GPUs are not very good in terms of hardware performance, the application development ecosystem is even worse.

However, if Zhiyun Semiconductor does not sell server GPUs to overseas customers, they will have no choice but to buy AMD computing cards... For Zhiyun Group, this is equivalent to giving orders to competitors and cultivating competitors.

If you don't sell computing power cards to the other party, the other party will not sit and wait to die, but will try to find ways to obtain sufficient computing power cards.

And Xu Shenxue doesn't want to see this kind of thing!
He hopes to continue to suppress AMD's server GPU business and force Qualcomm and Intel to back down.

As long as this continues for a few years, the technological gap between the two sides in the server GPU field will become increasingly larger.

Only at the very end will the supply be cut off, which will become a bottleneck.

Now... it's still a little early. Although AMD's server GPU business is half-dead, it is still alive. Qualcomm and Intel are also unwilling to give up and want to get a piece of the pie in the server GPU field.

Therefore, Xu Shenxue’s initial strategy for the server GPU business was very simple: dumping!

Through dumping, the current limited market can be completely monopolized, thereby eliminating the server GPU business of potential competitors such as AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.

After seeing off the satisfied Sergey, Xu Shenxue then personally contacted and negotiated with several other core manufacturers of server GPUs, including Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Tesla and the three major domestic Internet companies, and each of them promised a certain production capacity of APO4600 graphics cards.

There are various artificial intelligence models, mainly the open source GTAI2, and these open source artificial intelligence models only support the computing chip ecosystem of Zhiyun Group.

It has opened up sales of APO graphics cards, PX terminal computing power platforms, and LC lightweight smart terminal computing power chips.

The combination of open source artificial intelligence models, mature GPU development and application ecosystem, and computing power card hardware is a king bomb that is enough to make any competitor despair!

Xu Shenxue does not intend to leave too much room for server GPUs and device terminal computing chips to survive for other chip companies!
This is one of Zhiyun Group’s core businesses in the years to come, and it will not be easily given to competitors.

Of course, it is not easy to achieve this, at least the GPU production capacity must be supplied!
Therefore, when negotiating with major GPU core customers, Xu Shenxue also personally ordered the launch of the third phase of 3D packaging construction investment plan.

In the near future, three advanced 3D packaging factories will be built through modification and new construction, and the production capacity of advanced 3D packaging will be further increased to pieces per month.

This 3D packaging technology is one of the core technologies of computing chips, and the production capacity of 3D packaging directly limits the production capacity of computing chips.

At the same time, in the past two years, the demand for various types of computing chips has been increasing. The current demand for various types of computing chips by Zhiyun Group alone exceeds the monthly production capacity of 50,000 pieces... Compared with other companies, Zhiyun Group itself is actually the super large customer that purchases and uses various types of computing chips!

The computing chip production capacity used by Zhiyun Group alone accounts for more than 80 percent of the global computing chip market.

Therefore, in order to meet self-use and external sales, it has become necessary for Zhiyun Microelectronics to continue to expand advanced 3D packaging technology.

The three phases of advanced 3D packaging construction are expected to provide Zhiyun Microelectronics with a production capacity of pieces per month to initially meet chip demand... Of course, it only meets the initial demand in the early stage, and it is still not enough to truly open up supply.

Therefore, there will inevitably be a fourth phase of construction and a fifth phase...

The reason why we don’t build them on a large scale now is naturally because advanced 3D packaging factories are expensive!

As a supporting factory for a chip factory, this thing is not as expensive as a chip factory, but it is not cheap either.

The total investment for the construction of three advanced 3D packaging factories in the third phase alone is expected to reach billion US dollars!
Although Zhiyun Group is rich, it has many places to spend money... Not to mention anything else, the chip factory investment that also belongs to Zhiyun Microelectronics has never stopped, especially the estimated investment of equivalent seven-nanometer/five-nanometer process, which is over 100 billion US dollars.

Such a huge investment is a heavy burden even for Zhiyun Group.

It is not easy to squeeze out $3 billion from the huge R&D and construction expenditures to invest in building a D packaging factory.

Furthermore, although there is a huge demand for computing power chips now, there is also an upper limit. The major domestic and foreign customers of computing power chips, including Zhiyun Group, its sister companies, institutional customers, etc., are not going to spend tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars in one go to purchase chips.

Instead, purchases are made on a quarterly or annual basis... They also need time to raise money. It is not easy to raise huge amounts of money, such as tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

Even Google, a core overseas customer, although seemingly not short of money, ordered 4600 APO4600 graphics cards in one go. In order to quickly deliver some of the APO graphics cards, Google chose to directly purchase the finished GT series servers from Zhiyun Computing Technology Co., Ltd. For these finished GT server orders, the prices of CPU, memory, flash memory and other hardware equipment must also be added.

A large number of APO4600 graphics cards and GT servers ultimately brought the total contract value to US$ billion.

Even if Google has a lot of money, it is impossible for it to take out 8.6 billion US dollars in one go.

Instead, payments will be made simultaneously as deliveries are made over the coming year... in other words, it is a one-year installment payment.

Even for Google, which has a strong financial foundation, purchasing such a large number of APO4600 graphics cards is actually quite stressful for them.

Not to mention other companies, many of them cannot withstand the billions of dollars they have to spend in a year to purchase APO graphics cards and then plunge into the bottomless pit of artificial intelligence.

Therefore, it is also very important to maintain the production capacity of computing chips at a certain level to avoid overcapacity and low capacity utilization.

Therefore, the expansion of chip factories and packaging factories needs to follow certain market rules, otherwise it is easy to suffer losses.

If we build a monthly 3D packaging production capacity of hundreds of thousands of pieces (equivalent to eight-inch silicon wafers) in one go, we will be in tears if we don’t receive orders.

The same applies to the chip factory field!
Now Zhiyun Microelectronics is investing on a large scale to build advanced factories with equivalent 7nm/5nm processes. The investment is too huge. If too many are built at once and there are not enough orders in time, it will face huge losses!
Even a behemoth like Zhiyun Group cannot withstand huge losses of hundreds of billions of dollars!
Today, an advanced chip factory with an equivalent seven-nanometer process requires an investment of tens of billions of dollars. Building an advanced chip factory of this level is no different from simply burning money.

And this is still referring to the use of immersion lithography machines, namely the HDUV-600 or ALMS NXT1980 lithography machines... Although these two lithography machines are pushing the technological limits, they are still relatively cheaper in terms of construction costs.

If EUV lithography machines of the HEUV-300A or NXT3400 in ALMS are used, plus a whole set of other higher-level equipment, the cost of the factory will continue to soar, easily exceeding US$ billion.

Because the price of just one EUV lithography machine is about 150 million US dollars, which is twice as much as the top immersion lithography machine.

A chip factory needs not just one or two lithography machines, but many!
The lithography machine is just one important piece of equipment in a chip factory, and other equipment can cost tens of millions of dollars.

As technologically advanced equipment becomes more and more expensive, the cost of building chip factories is also increasing!

With the same production capacity, the cost of building a chip factory has soared from several billion dollars to more than 10 billion dollars in just a few years!
It’s also very scary!

But money is actually a small matter... The most important thing is that many chip factories cannot buy these advanced top-level equipment even if they have money.

Because whether it is Gulf Technology's HEUV-300A or ALMS's NCT3400B of the same level, the initial production capacity is very limited. It is extremely difficult to grab this limited production capacity.

(End of this chapter)