Hon Hai’s August sales surged 52% year over year to NT$921.8 billion, roughly $29.1 billion, powered by relentless demand for AI servers. The Taiwanese manufacturing giant has now outpaced analyst forecasts so dramatically that its monthly revenue report has morphed into a bellwether for the entire artificial intelligence trade.
The company, better known as Foxconn, builds Nvidia’s server hardware. July delivered 54% growth, and analysts projected around 37% for the quarter ending September. Foxconn keeps smashing those expectations.
Skeptics have warned for months about overcapacity, mounting debt, and brutal competition in the AI infrastructure space. The revenue numbers, however, refuse to cooperate with that narrative. AI servers now account for more income than every other Foxconn product line combined.
Apple fills much of the remainder. Foxconn remains the dominant iPhone assembler, operating plants across China and India on thinner margins, while Apple gradually shifts work toward rival Luxshare Precision. Analysts Steven Tseng and Rebecca Wang from Bloomberg Intelligence point out that the consumer electronics segment dilutes cloud momentum, dragging gross margin and forward price-to-earnings below industry peers.
Meanwhile, the order backlog compounds while markets debate what the spending eventually yields. Demand fundamentals and investor confidence have decoupled.
Europe now prepares to feed that same backlog, and Foxconn has already secured the assembler role. The company signed a manufacturing partnership with Bull, France’s state-owned computing firm, on June 1 with an initial commitment exceeding EUR 120 million.
Production splits between two locations. Component manufacturing and initial testing occur at Foxconn’s plant in Pardubice, Czech Republic. Final assembly, integration, and system validation happen at Bull’s factory in Angers, France.
Jesse Chao, Foxconn’s head of AI and quantum, framed the collaboration as advancing sovereign AI infrastructure across Europe. The French state acquired Bull from Atos for EUR 404 million in April, presenting the purchase as a strategic sovereignty measure.
The European Commission has pledged EUR 20 billion toward AI gigafactories, with 77 proposals spanning 16 member states and initial construction slated for 2027. Those server racks will roll out of France, built from Czech components, by a Taiwanese company earning $29 billion monthly.
