Message from the President November.2024

With an eye toward the realization of a sustainable society, companies and individuals are working to achieve the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) related to poverty, health, energy and the environment, and other issues, that were established as initial common global goals to be achieved in the 15-year period from 2016 to 2030.

One of the initiatives for this is the promotion of digitalization and automation through the development and utilization of AI. For example, factories facing a lack of human resources are leveraging AI and robots to automate operations. In addition, AI contributes from other perspectives through operations such as the identification of inefficiencies in production processes based on past production data to improve operational efficiency and quality, and the optimization of energy usage by analyzing energy consumption patterns in productions processes.

However, it has also been reported that data centers that quickly process large amounts of data, for operations such as generative AI operations, require huge amounts of electricity. When discussing AI's impact on energy demand, we should comprehensively consider positive factors such as the energy savings brought to society by introducing AI technologies and negative factors such as the increase in data center power consumption due to AI operations.

Of course, more effort will be put into the development and utilization of AI going forward, and expectations will continue to grow regarding the development of next-generation power-saving technologies. In conjunction with energy-saving technologies in the area of semiconductors, attention should be paid to integration technologies achieved through the miniaturization of transistors, advanced packages that connect multiple semiconductor chips, photoelectric fusion technologies that feature a fusion of optical wiring and information transmission, and the development of dedicated chips specialized in AI processing. Looking at what is happening at data centers, there is the possibility of using only solid-state data storage which can have a superb energy-saving effect. In addition, it is increasingly expected that a combination of sources of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and storage systems will contribute to a reduction of energy usage and an increase in environmental awareness.

The evolution of AI will drastically change our values and roles. It is expected that AI will take over the role of organizing and generalizing the vast amount of technology and information that is openly available around the world. So, how we can demonstrate our value? We can demonstrate it by leveraging the thing that differentiates our company or each of us individually has. The thing that differentiates us is quality. We will further refine the unique quality that has been developed by Meitec and its engineers over many years. By providing this quality to customers, we will contribute to society together with them. With this in mind, let's improve our technologies by working hard with our teammates.