According to the Washington Post, new coronavirus infections halt chip assembly lines in Southeast Asia, forcing more car companies and electronics manufacturers to suspend production.

A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips, the paper said.

Martin Daum, chief executive of the Daimler AG division that makes trucks and buses, was quoted as saying that the problem as intensifying.

"Until the second quarter we were able to manage the situation quite well at Daimler Truck", Daum said.

"But since summer the semiconductor situation has worsened for us. Our production in Germany and the US was affected, which led to a situation in which we could deliver fewer vehicles to our customers."

Taiwan's TSMC, which produces a type of chip called a microcontroller that is widely used by automakers, said it is increasing output of the components by 60 percent this year compared with 2020.

GlobalFoundries is adding manufacturing equipment to a factory near Albany, NY, to increase output for all types of chips, and recently broke ground on a $4 billion expansion of its factory in Singapore, with financial support from the Singaporean government.

Globally, chip factories have increased their production capacity by eight per cent since early 2020 and plan to boost it by over 16 percent by the end of 2022, according to the US-based Semiconductor Industry Association.

Intel on Friday will break ground on two new chip factories in Arizona, on which it plans to spend $20 billion.