Taipei (AFP) – Nvidia will increase investment in Taiwan to $150 billion a year, the US chip giant’s boss said Wednesday, describing the export-driven island as the “epicentre of the AI revolution”. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the world’s most valuable company, said “Taiwan is booming” and Nvidia’s investment, up from $100 billion, will “fuel an incredible ecosystem here”.
Taiwan is a powerhouse in the manufacturing of semiconductors used to train and power artificial intelligence systems. The island is home to hardware production giants TSMC, which turns Nvidia’s cutting-edge designs into silicon components, and Foxconn, which assembles the processors to make data centre servers. “Four years ago, five years ago, Nvidia was spending about $10, $15 billion a year in Taiwan,” Huang said in Taipei where the company is building a new office. “Now, we’re spending $100 going to $150 billion in Taiwan each year.”
Taiwan’s economy soared last year thanks to skyrocketing exports of AI hardware as governments and companies around the world pour hundreds of billions of dollars into developing the technology. “Taiwan is the epicenter of the AI revolution,” Huang said. “This is where the chips come, packaging comes. This is where the systems are made. This is where AI supercomputers were created,” he said.
Huang said Nvidia “will continue to grow” in Taiwan where its new office will be able to accommodate “about 4,000 engineers”. “This is going to be the manufacturing, the technology, electronics manufacturing hub for the world for a long time to come,” Huang said. “And so we will be here to support, to partner with our ecosystem, to do co-engineering with our ecosystem partners and to support their growth. And so this is going to be a very important site for us.”
Huang is in Taipei ahead of the island’s top tech show, Computex, next week. His remarks came after Nvidia last week posted record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, blowing past Wall Street forecasts as insatiable demand for its AI hardware powered another blockbuster quarter. The results for the first quarter marked an 85 percent jump from the same period a year ago and a 20 percent rise from the prior quarter, underscoring Nvidia’s status as the primary beneficiary of a global AI infrastructure buildout. Net profit surged to $58.3 billion, more than tripling from $18.8 billion in the year-earlier period.
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