Source: Taiwan News 2019/06/27

A groundbreaking ceremony was held at Hsinchu Science Park on Thursday (June 27) for a new building complex for Qualcomm, an American semiconductor multinational.

The complex will house its Center for Operations, Manufacturing, Engineering, and Testing (COMET), a 5G test laboratory, a multimedia R&D center, and a mobile AI innovation center, reported Liberty Times.

This marks a milestone in the company’s plans to invest in Taiwan, according to Roawen Chen (陳若文), Qualcomm's senior vice president of global manufacturing technology and operations. Also attending the event was Vice Premier Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), who in his address described Qualcomm as a leading chipmaker and expressed hopes that the company’s presence in Taiwan would lead to a win-win relationship.

The setup of the new tech hub stems from an anti-trust settlement between Qualcomm and the country’s Fair Trade Commission last August, when the company agreed to pay a fine of $93 million in addition to pledging $700 million in a five-year investment plan in Taiwan, reported Reuters.

The construction of the facility, which takes up an area of 2,200 pings (7,273 square meters) and could generate 1,000 jobs, is slated for completion in two years. The cost of the project is estimated to be NT$5.5 billion (US$175 million), wrote Liberty Times.