The Taiwan media is reporting that Foxconn has been busy moving more and more of its production from China to India, with the main focus being on Apple's iPhone and iPad products for now. Foxconn has been producing iPhones for the Indian market in India since 2019, but the story here is that China has banned Foxconn from sending Chinese staff to India to train the local staff and oversee the production. This has resulted in Foxconn having to send staff from Taiwan to India instead, but they might not be as familiar with the entire production process as the ones that are based in the factories in China.

This is only part of the issue though, as the news reports are also mentioning that China is preventing Foxconn from sending machines and equipment needed for the production to India. The same issue is said to be affecting other Taiwanese companies that are moving some of their production out of China to India, but they've had no issues when it comes to sending equipment to other nations in South East Asia. The equipment is apparently not possible to produce locally in India either, which means that these companies are more or less being forced to keep their production in China. To work around this issue, Foxconn is said to be sending half-finished phones and components to India, to do the final assembly there, to keep up production in India. So far, this is just rumours out of Taiwan, but it looks like China is intent on keeping the production on its shores for as long as it can.

NVIDIA is working with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S. Together with leading manufacturing partners, the company has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test NVIDIA Blackwell chips in Arizona and AI supercomputers in Texas. NVIDIA Blackwell chips have started production at TSMC's chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona. NVIDIA is building supercomputer manufacturing plants in Texas, with Foxconn in Houston and with Wistron in Dallas. Mass production at both plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12-15 months. The AI chip and supercomputer supply chain is complex and demands the most advanced manufacturing, packaging, assembly and test technologies. NVIDIA is partnering with Amkor and SPIL for packaging and testing operations in Arizona.

Within the next four years, NVIDIA plans to produce up to half a trillion dollars of AI infrastructure in the United States through partnerships with TSMC, Foxconn, Wistron, Amkor and SPIL. These world-leading companies are deepening their partnership with NVIDIA, growing their businesses while expanding their global footprint and hardening supply chain resilience. NVIDIA AI supercomputers are the engines of a new type of data center created for the sole purpose of processing artificial intelligence—AI factories that are the infrastructure powering a new AI industry. Tens of "gigawatt AI factories" are expected to be built in the coming years. Manufacturing NVIDIA AI chips and supercomputers for American AI factories is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and drive trillions of dollars in economic security over the coming decades.

NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang made some interesting commentary for the Financial Times, stating that the company will procure over half a trillion US Dollars worth of electronics over the next four years, and it it plans to keep hundreds of billions from the supply chain procurement in the US. "Overall, we will procure, over the course of the next four years, probably half a trillion dollars worth of electronics in total. And I think we can easily see ourselves manufacturing several hundred billion of it here in the US," said Jensen for FT. NVIDIA currently manufactures its silicon at TSMC's facilities, as well as electronics like motherboards and servers at Foxconn. However, the geopolitical situation is making NVIDIA reconsider its supply chain dependencies, and the company is looking for more US-based manufacturing.

NVIDIA confirmed that its latest "Blackwell" series of GPUs, including the latest Blackwell Ultra, are being manufactured at TSMC's Arizona facilities. TSMC announced a $100 billion investment in its Arizona expansion, and NVIDIA is ready to take up more of TSMC's capacity to meet its ever-growing demand for GPUs. During the GTC 2025 event, Jensen noted that only four cloud service providers will use 3.6 million GPUs this year. That is without any AI labs and enterprises, which are massive consumers of GPUs (xAI only has 200,000 GPU clusters). To continue manufacturing excellence so customers won't suffer, NVIDIA is also looking at other options for supply chain manufacturing partners. Intel, the only US-based company capable of producing advanced silicon, is a potential target for NVIDIA. "We evaluate their foundry technology on a regular basis, and we are ongoing in doing that... We look for opportunities to be a customer of theirs... I have every confidence that Intel can do it," added Jensen, who also stated that NVIDIA is interested in silicon manufacturing and chip packaging services, as Intel's Foveros 3D packaging and other technologies are attractive for Team Green.

Hon Hai Technology Group ("Foxconn") today announced its full year and fourth quarter 2024 financial results.

Full year 2024 net profit reached NT$152.7 billion, resulting in earnings per share of NT$11.01, a 17-year-high. At the same time, the Group announced that it will distribute a cash dividend of NT$5.80 per share, a record level since it's listing in 1991. Despite significant changes in global tariff policies, geopolitical risks and monetary policies, the outlook for 2025 is for strong growth. The company also shared key developments around its three major smart platforms, as well as on AI and EV in 2025.

SoftBank Corp., ZutaCore and Hon Hai Technology Group ("Foxconn") today announced they implemented ZutaCore's two-phase DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) technology in an AI server using NVIDIA accelerated computing, making it the world's first implementation of ZutaCore's two-phase DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) technology using NVIDIA H200 GPUs. In addition, SoftBank designed and developed a rack-integrated solution that integrates each component of the server, including cooling equipment with two-phase DLC technology, on a rack scale, and conducted an operational demonstration and performance evaluation at its data center in February 2025. The demonstration results indicated the solution passed NVIDIA's temperature test (NVQual), thereby confirming the compatibility, stability and reliability of this rack-integrated solution. The solution also achieved pPUE (partial Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.03 (actual measured value) per rack for cooling efficiency

With the spread and increased adoption of AI, demand for AI servers and other computing resources is expected to expand significantly, further increasing power consumption at data centers. At the same time, reducing power consumption from the perspective of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has become a pressing issue worldwide, requiring data centers to become more efficient, consume less power, and introduce innovative heat removal solutions. Since May 2024, SoftBank has been collaborating with ZutaCore, a global leader in the development and business deployment of two-phase DLC technology, to develop solutions optimized for low power consumption at AI data centers.

NVIDIA and Foxconn are building Taiwan's largest supercomputer, marking a milestone in the island's AI advancement. The project, Hon Hai Kaohsiung Super Computing Center, revealed Tuesday at Hon Hai Tech Day, will be built around NVIDIA's groundbreaking Blackwell architecture and feature the GB200 NVL72 platform, which includes a total of 64 racks and 4,608 Tensor Core GPUs. With an expected performance of over 90 exaflops of AI performance, the machine would easily be considered the fastest in Taiwan.

Foxconn plans to use the supercomputer, once operational, to power breakthroughs in cancer research, large language model development and smart city innovations, positioning Taiwan as a global leader in AI-driven industries. Foxconn's "three-platform strategy" focuses on smart manufacturing, smart cities and electric vehicles. The new supercomputer will play a pivotal role in supporting Foxconn's ongoing efforts in digital twins, robotic automation and smart urban infrastructure, bringing AI-assisted services to urban areas like Kaohsiung.

NVIDIA today announced major advancements to Universal Scene Description, or OpenUSD, that will expand adoption of the universal 3D data interchange framework to robotics, industrial design and engineering, and accelerate developers' abilities to build highly accurate virtual worlds for the next evolution of AI.

Through new OpenUSD-based generative AI and NVIDIA-accelerated development frameworks built on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, more industries can now develop applications for visualizing industrial design and engineering projects, and for simulating environments to build the next wave of physical AI and robots.

TrendForce underscores that the primary momentum for server shipments this year remains with American CSPs. However, due to persistently high inflation and elevated corporate financing costs curtailing capital expenditures, overall demand has not yet returned to pre-pandemic growth levels. Global server shipments are estimated to reach approximately. 13.654 million units in 2024, an increase of about 2.05% YoY. Meanwhile, the market continues to focus on the deployment of AI servers, with their shipment share estimated at around 12.1%.

Foxconn is expected to see the highest growth rate, with an estimated annual increase of about 5-7%. This growth includes significant orders such as Dell's 16G platform, AWS Graviton 3 and 4, Google Genoa, and Microsoft Gen9. In terms of AI server orders, Foxconn has made notable inroads with Oracle and has also secured some AWS ASIC orders.

The spirit of software pioneer Grace Hopper will live on at NVIDIA GTC. Accelerated systems using powerful processors - named in honor of the pioneer of software programming - will be on display at the global AI conference running March 18-21, ready to take computing to the next level. System makers will show more than 500 servers in multiple configurations across 18 racks, all packing NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. They'll form the largest display at NVIDIA's booth in the San Jose Convention Center, filling the MGX Pavilion.

MGX Speeds Time to Market
NVIDIA MGX is a blueprint for building accelerated servers with any combination of GPUs, CPUs and data processing units (DPUs) for a wide range of AI, high performance computing and NVIDIA Omniverse applications. It's a modular reference architecture for use across multiple product generations and workloads. GTC attendees can get an up-close look at MGX models tailored for enterprise, cloud and telco-edge uses, such as generative AI inference, recommenders and data analytics. The pavilion will showcase accelerated systems packing single and dual GH200 Superchips in 1U and 2U chassis, linked via NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 400 Gb/s InfiniBand networks over LinkX cables and transceivers. The systems support industry standards for 19- and 21-inch rack enclosures, and many provide E1.S bays for nonvolatile storage.

NVIDIA today announced that it is collaborating with Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) to accelerate the AI industrial revolution. Foxconn will integrate NVIDIA technology to develop a new class of data centers powering a wide range of applications—including digitalization of manufacturing and inspection workflows, development of AI-powered electric vehicle and robotics platforms, and a growing number of language-based generative AI services.

Announced in a fireside chat with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Foxconn Chairman and CEO Young Liu at Hon Hai Tech Day, in Taipei, the collaboration starts with the creation of AI factories—an NVIDIA GPU computing infrastructure specially built for processing, refining and transforming vast amounts of data into valuable AI models and tokens—based on the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform, including the latest NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software.

The BBC has conducted an exclusive interview with Young Liu, the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Foxconn. The discussion focused mostly on the Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer having to navigate choppy waters—it is adapting to cooling international relations with China. Foxconn has many production plants in the region—most notably more than half of Apple products (iPhones and iMacs) are made in these facilities, but Liu's firm has already shifted production bases to other countries and continues to do so. Foxconn has done very well for itself from a traditional strategy of manufacturing US-designed products in China—other lucrative contracts have resulted from partnerships with Sony, Microsoft, Amazon and Dell. Liu acknowledges that some of his Western clients have requested that their products be manufactured outside of China due to political pressures: "They get the push from their government about de-risking, and then they will let us know."

The subject matter changes to Foxconn's ambition in the world of electic vehicles—Liu is less guarded about his company's targeted growth in this market. He cites wanting to gain 5% of the global EV market within the next few years, and is reported to confident about his firm's prospects. He demonstrated a prototype SUV model to the BBC reporter, with emphasis on the car's dashboard: "Look at this - this is a big iPhone, so we're very familiar with this." Foxconn had a small number of EV models on display, but it hopes to target middle-class buyers with eventual product launches. Liu explained that his company's expertise in electronics is a great advantage as they delve into a new market segment: "The reason why we think this is a great opportunity for us is that with the traditional gas engine, you have engines which are mostly mechanical. But with EVs, it's batteries and motors." Foxconn has plans for a global set of car manufacturing facilities—Thailand, Indonesia, India and the USA are mentioned. Liu proposes that his firm's future success will hinge on this diversified location model: "It doesn't make sense for you to make [EVs] in one place, so regionalized production for cars is very natural."

Foxconn has commited to $500 million of investments into new operations within Telangana, a southern state located in India. The region's IT minister, K. T. Rama Rao, broke the news earlier today and declared that the Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer will be building new factory facilities - with the first example breaking ground in Kongara Kalan (a village to the south of Hyderabad) this morning.

The minister estimates that the "first phase" of new Foxconn manufacturing plants will help generate 25,000 "direct jobs" across the state of Telangana. Reuters has previously reported that Foxconn has been granted a new contract for the manufacture of next generation AirPods - Apple is a key client for the company, and executives have pushed for a shift in production locations due to problems encountered in China. Foxconn's move into India is observed as a strategic decision - facilities are less likely to get shutdown (due to health restrictions) and the country is not getting hit with advanced semiconductor sanctions.

Due to the various major events that affected the global economy and politics, the overall demand for consumer electronics made a sharp downward turn in 2022, and global shipments of notebook (laptop) computers began to fall over the quarters. TrendForce's latest analysis finds that global shipments of notebook computers (from ODMs) reached just around 186 million units for 2022, showing a YoY drop of 24.5%. As for 2023, the outlook on the performance of the notebook computer market remains uncertain at this moment. TrendForce expects the YoY decline to moderate to about 7.8%, but shipments are projected to total only 171 million units.

Because market demand was anemic in 4Q22, promotional activities related to the traditional year-end peak season did not generate a lot of sales momentum. Looking at regional markets, notebook brands (PC OEMs) slashed prices in the US and China, but their sales results still did not meet expectations. This development was mainly attributed to factors such as high inflation suppressing consumers' disposable income. Since the sales results for 4Q22 were lackluster, efforts to get rid of the existing stockpile of whole devices might continue through 2Q23. Furthermore, order placements from channels are going to be much more restrained.

According to TrendForce's latest research, global smartphone production totaled around 289 million units for 3Q22, showing a slight QoQ drop of 0.9% and a YoY drop of 11%. The smartphone market thus exhibited an extremely weak demand situation as the "iron law" of positive growth in the third quarter was broken after being in effect for years. The contraction of smartphone production during this year's peak season was mainly attributed to smartphone brands giving priority to consumption of channel inventory for whole devices and maintaining a fairly conservative production plan for 3Q22. Moreover, they had kept lowering their production targets due to strong global economic headwinds.

Regarding the performances of the major smartphone brands in 3Q22, Samsung posted around 64.2 million units in device production, showing a QoQ increase of just 3.9%. This was the result of the brand scaling back production since 2Q22 and maintaining a conservative outlook on the future market situation. Due to persistent inventory pressure, Samsung is expected to again post a QoQ decline for 4Q22. In the aspect of product development, Samsung has been the leader in foldable smartphones. This year, the global market share of foldable smartphones is estimated to reach 1.1%; and within this segment, Samsung is expected to hold a market share of almost 90%. As for 2023, the global market share of foldable smartphones is forecasted to climb to 1.5%, and Samsung is forecasted to retain a market share of almost 80% in the segment.

Foxconn's ambitions as a semiconductor player are growing with yet another potential joint venture being announced, this time in Malaysia. Hang on, Foxconn doesn't make semiconductors you might be thinking right now, but the company has actually owned semiconductor fabs since 2016, when it acquired Sharp and ended up with an 8-inch fab in Fukuyama in Japan. Foxconn has also tried to buy an 8-inch fab in Malaysia in 2020, as well as trying to take over Taiwanese non-volatile memory manufacturer Macronix at one point. It seems like the company has decided to take a different route this year, with news of a joint venture in India and now plans of another joint venture with Dagang NeXchange Berhad (DNex) in Malaysia.

The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), although it's a subsidiary of Foxconn, Big Innovation Holding Limited (BIH) that actually signed the paperwork. The MOU is about building a 12-inch fab according to Focus Taiwan/CNA which reports that the fab will be making chips using 40 to 28 nm processes. It's possible that this will be for the various EV projects that Foxconn is involved with and it would be a less risky way to enter the semiconductor market for Foxconn. The fab is said to be able to output 40,000 wafers a month once it starts, although when this will be is anyone's guess at the moment. Foxconn's focus is on what the company calls the 3 plus 3 initiative, which relates to electrical vehicles, robotics and healthcare solutions, which are built in AI, semiconductors and communication technologies, all presumably from within Foxconn. Time will tell if Foxconn manages to pull this off, but until the construction of the fab has started, this is nothing more than a potential project for Foxconn.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced its ongoing commitment in Europe by building its first factory in the region for next-generation high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems to accelerate delivery to customers and strengthen the region's supplier ecosystem. The new site will manufacture HPE's industry-leading systems as custom-designed solutions to advance scientific research, mature AL/ML initiatives, and bolster innovation.

The dedicated HPC factory, which will become the fourth of HPE's global HPC sites, will be located in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, next to HPE's existing European site for manufacturing its industry-standard servers and storage solutions. Operations will begin in summer 2022.

At the end of 2021, there was quite a lot of noise when it came to India's homegrown semiconductor fab initiative, where the nation was trying to win over Intel, as well as some other semiconductor manufacturers. It would appear that the Indian government has stepped up its efforts and is now actively pitching to Intel, GlobalFoundries and TSMC. The main person behind this is said to be Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state for technology and entrepreneurship and a former Intel engineer. So far it seems like Chandrasekhar hasn't gotten very far according to the article The Economic Times, where he states that "We're meeting the CEOs, talking to them, making presentations."

On the other hand, recent news has suggested that Foxconn is interested in setting up some kind of foundry in India, in a partnership with local Vedanta Group. It's unclear what kind of semiconductors this would be for though, especially as Vedanta is mostly in the mining industry. The various Indian states are said to be very keen on the other hand, both in terms of getting new industry, but also in getting new investments. Earlier this month, during his tour of several Asian countries, Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger had a meeting with the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, but what came of that meeting is unclear. India is hoping to be able to reproduce the success it has had when it comes to manufacturing smartphones locally, with Samsung, Nokia and Xiaomi producing locally, as well as Taiwanese Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, who contract manufacture Apple devices. However, semiconductors are far more complex to make than smartphones, so if India isn't willing to play the long game, it's unlikely much will come of its attempts to attract semiconductor foundries.

Foxconn, which is a key supplier of Apple products, announced on Monday, that it is suspending production in its Shenzhen plants to comply with a new COVID-19 lockdown in the region. The company is attempting to minimize the impact of this on the supply-chain, by increasing manufacturing output of its plants in other regions, it said in a statement. China is witnessing its highest surge in COVID-19 cases since 2020, and the fresh outbreak is expected to affect manufacturing across the country, as factories comply with cubs set in place by health officials. Besides Foxconn, two other suppliers of Apple, namely Unimicron and Sunflex, have announced a suspension of manufacturing operations in the Shenzhen area.

Vedanta, one of India's leading multinational groups, and Hon Hai Technology Group ("Foxconn"), world's largest electronics manufacturing company, today announced signing an MOU to form a joint venture company that will manufacture semiconductors in India. This first-of-its-kind joint venture between the two companies will support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision to create an ecosystem for semiconductor manufacturing in India.

According to the MOU signed between the two companies, Vedanta will hold the majority of the equity in the JV, while Foxconn will be the minority shareholder. Vedanta Chairman Anil Agarwal will be the Chairman of the joint venture company. The targeted project plans to invest for manufacturing semiconductors. It will provide a significant boost to domestic manufacturing of electronics in India. Discussions are currently ongoing with a few State Governments to finalize the location of the plant. The collaboration between Vedanta and Foxconn follows the India Government's recent policy announcement for Electronics Manufacturing & PLI scheme for incentivizing organizations to contribute towards development of this sector. This will be the first joint venture in the electronics manufacturing space after the announcement of the policy.

Over the past couple of months there have been a lot of calls for more investment into the semiconductor industry due to the current shortage of many different kinds of semiconductors. As we've seen, several government organizations have already started working on how to woo chip makers to their part of the world and the latest nation to join the fray is India.

Unlike the US and the EU where so far no firm budgets have been approved, India has already approved a US$10 billion incentive plan for semiconductor, as well as display panel manufacturers who are willing to consider India as the next location for their new fabs. According to Reuters, the Indian government is said to cover up to 50 percent of the project cost of new semiconductor and display panel fabs. So far it seems like at least three companies are interested in the scheme for semiconductor manufacturing, namely Tower Semiconductor out of Israel, Foxconn and an unnamed Singaporean consortium.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the production availability of its EM6 Series Enterprise NVMe-oF solid state drives (SSDs) for Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) systems. Using the Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-oF SSD converter controller that converts an NVMe SSD into a dual-ported 25Gb NVMe-oF SSD, KIOXIA EM6 Series drives expose the entire SSD bandwidth to the network.

Due to their ability to scale performance of NVMe SSDs, native NVMe-oF architectures are well-suited for applications such as artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), high performance computing (HPC) and storage expansion. In the case of HPC, leveraging the Lustre file system, which is used to provide high bandwidth and parallel access to compute clusters, is beneficial to NVMe-oF based storage, such as EBOF systems with EM6 SSDs, that enable high availability (HA) configurations. An HPC HA configuration example consists of multiple and redundant network connections between a compute host and an EBOF with 88SN2400-connected NVMe SSDs, to deliver scalable throughput based on the number of SSDs.

Despite the current shortage of just about everything, Foxconn doesn't appear to be suffering, as the company has reported record sales for the third quarter of this year. The company recorded sales of close to NT$1.4 trillion, or about US$50 billion, with a consolidated revenue of just over NT$585.7 billion or about US$20.9 billion.

Sales revenue for Foxconn increased 8.8 percent compared to the same period last year and a 3.44 percent increase quarter on quarter, with sales in September being the best so far this year for the company. The top grossing product groups included consumer smart devices, computers and cloud networking products. This is likely due to no small part due to Apple launching the iPhone 13, as well as its new tablet products last month. Foxconn is expecting a gross profit of 12 to 13 percent for the second half of 2021, which is a significant increase from around 8 to 9 percent for the first half of the year.

AMD's decision to not launch its Ryzen 4000G "Renoir" Socket AM4 processors in the DIY retail channel has baffled many in the PC enthusiast community. The parts are now exclusively in the OEM channel, however bootlegging of these chips out of the tray is rampant in Asia. A Hong Kong based eBay seller listed several 4000G SKUs, such as the flagship Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G, at a premium.

Apparently trays of 4000G chips - which aren't even supposed to end up with SI (system integrators), and only with big OEMs (think Compal, Foxconn, Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc), have somehow made their way to Asia's PC retail malls, where they're sold piecemeal, and at a premium. You pay for a chip, and the storekeeper pops one out of the tray and hands it over to you, straight up. Don't want to deal with its pins? Why not bundle it with a compatible motherboard from the same retailer, who will install the chip on the socket for you? Listings such as this one, are fraught with all the risks of bootleg commerce - the chip comes with no warranties, and the seller accepts no returns. Your only protection against getting a paperweight in your box is PayPal. It's time AMD put an end to this bovine defecation with a retail launch.

Softbank-owned company Arm Ltd. has been a subject to a round of rumors regarding the potential buyout of the company because Softbank has considered selling it for some time. The company has approached NVIDIA, with their talks getting "advanced", and Samsung wants a piece of the cake as well. It is now reported that Softbank has approached TSMC and Foxconn as well, regarding a potential Arm takeover. In the report by Nikkei Asia, we have found out that Arm has shared the same financial data points and business plan with TSMC and Foxconn, the same way company did with NVIDIA.

If TSMC and Foxconn have any interest in the company, it would be necessary to create a consortium that would operate Arm Ltd. With NVIDIA, Samsung, and these two new players, the consortium would already count four companies. Nikkei sources claim that Apple and Qualcomm have been also included in the poll of potential buyers, which would make the idea of establishing a consortium very valid.

Belkin, the connected things division within the Belkin International and Foxconn Interconnect Technology entity, today announced the Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core. It completes Belkin's family of Thunderbolt 3 docks, including the Thunderbolt 3 Dock Pro, Thunderbolt 3 Dock Plus and the Thunderbolt 3 Dock Mini.

The Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core, the world's first Thunderbolt -certified, dual-powered dock, offers compatibility to bring the benefits of Thunderbolt 3 technology to both Mac and Windows laptops. Like the entire Belkin Dock family, it's designed for users who need fast transfer rates and a one cable solution to connect laptops to peripherals. The Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core has a small, compact footprint, reducing clutter and multiple cables on a desk.