Today’s episode examines three questions shaping the next phase of Taiwan’s tech future, from advanced process IP to energy security to the trillion-dollar AI investment curve.
Q1: Why is Taiwan treating the TSMC investigation as a national security moment
A former senior VP for corporate strategy at TSMC, Lo Wei jen, is under investigation after allegedly removing restricted documents tied to the 2 nanometer node and the upcoming A16 and A14 roadmaps for 2026 and 2028. Focus Taiwan reports he took more than 80 boxes of materials before returning to Intel after 21 years at TSMC. Prosecutors and the Ministry of Economic Affairs are evaluating potential violations of national security law.
This case underscores the vulnerability of advanced node IP at a time when months of advantage translate into global market power. The concern is not only commercial. It is geopolitical. Taiwan’s process leadership is the anchor of the global AI hardware economy, and this incident shows how fragile that moat can be when talent mobility collides with strategic technology.
Q2: What is the largest constraint on Taiwan’s AI ambitions according to industry leaders
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger delivered a stark warning in Taipei. As reported by the Taipei Times, he stated that Taiwan is not in a position to secure a resilient energy supply chain and that energy reliability is the single biggest obstacle to AI growth. Semiconductor manufacturing already consumes about 10 percent of Taiwan’s electricity according to DIGITIMES Asia.
Gelsinger noted that this energy ceiling is the reason the AI boom is not a classic bubble. Cloud companies cannot deploy infrastructure faster than the grid can support it. He also pointed to new technologies like xLight’s EUV alternative, which aims to double lithography productivity while cutting power use. These innovations highlight both the urgency and opportunity of Taiwan’s next wave of industrial upgrades.
Q3: Is the global AI boom a sustainable cycle or a bubble with structural limits
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the BBC that AI investment contains irrational elements, even as he argues the underlying shift is profound. Google has tripled its annual infrastructure spending from 30 billion dollars to more than 90 billion dollars, with industry-wide investment surpassing the trillion-dollar mark.
Real-world ripple effects are already emerging. Reuters cites Counterpoint Research reporting that Nvidia plans to shift server memory from DDR5 to LPDDR to reduce energy consumption. This change will tighten supply across memory categories and push server memory prices up, with forecasts of potential doubling by late 2026. These shifts illustrate the physical constraints and supply chain interdependencies that shape whether AI growth accelerates or stalls.
Q4: How is Taiwan responding as global competition intensifies
Taiwan News reports that the government has launched a NT 100 billion program, approximately 3.2 billion US dollars, to position the island as a global AI hub. The investment aims to generate NT 15 trillion in economic value by 2040 and includes new research centers in silicon photonics and quantum computing, along with a national AI computing facility.
Yet the same energy bottleneck that Gelsinger highlighted remains the pivotal variable. Taiwan is committing to an AI industrial future, but the scale of its ambition demands energy resilience that has not yet been secured.
Listen to the full episode
Inside Taiwan unpacks what these tensions reveal about the next decade of semiconductor leadership and the realities shaping the global AI economy.
【About the Show】Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten minute executive briefing. It is an AI powered signal over noise for global investors and decision makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
From Taipei, the center of the world’s semiconductor engine, we track the key shifts shaping the global AI supply chain. Inside Taiwan is a daily AI-powered podcast delivering fast, reliable analysis from the island’s unique vantage point.
Q: Is the AI market cooling, or is demand still accelerating beneath the volatility?
Institutional selling from major investors contrasts with record-high demand across compute infrastructure. Taiwan’s supply chain data, from TSMC’s reserved 3 nanometer capacity to double-digit AI server growth forecasts, suggests long-term acceleration rather than a slowdown.
Q: What bottlenecks could slow the next phase of AI growth?
Energy supply remains a significant constraint for the island, and semiconductor capacity limits are emerging as global choke points. These pressures mirror the concerns raised by leaders like Satya Nadella and Andrew Ng, who see supply constraints rather than demand risks.
Q: Which technologies signal where the next breakthroughs will come from?
Silicon photonics is gaining momentum as companies shift from copper to light, improving speed and energy efficiency. New Taiwan-linked partnerships, including Ayar Labs and GUC working toward mass production by 2028, point to an inflection in next-generation AI architecture.
Q: Why is learning to code with AI becoming a core skill for the future?
Andrew Ng argues that the belief that “coding is obsolete” is deeply misleading. AI lowers the barrier to software creation, but people still need to frame problems clearly and tell computers exactly what to do, which makes coding with AI more important, not less.
Listen to the full episode for the complete breakdown of the signals shaping the world’s most valuable supply chain.
【About the Show】Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It is an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
This episode examines the forces reshaping memory, manufacturing, and investment flows across Asia, and why Taiwan is becoming the blueprint for the next decade of AI growth.
Q: How is Asia redefining the infrastructure map for AI?
Taiwan’s GMI Cloud and Nvidia are building a 500 million dollar AI factory with 7,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and a 16 megawatt footprint. Leadership from Nvidia calls it a benchmark for energy efficient AI. In Korea, Samsung plans about 340 billion dollars of domestic investment while SK Group’s Yongin cluster may exceed 400 billion dollars with new fabs dedicated to HBM. These buildouts show how the region is shaping the next phase of AI hardware capacity.
Q: How are global investors positioning around AI?
JP Morgan Asset Management notes that the lesson from the dot-com era was not to stop investing in technology, and that AI represents a long runway of structural capex. At the same time, 13F filings show selective positioning. Large inflows continue for Nvidia and Alphabet, while several underperforming tech firms saw outflows. Peter Thiel’s fund fully exited its Nvidia stake, highlighting that the market is optimistic but increasingly disciplined.
Q: What breakthrough horizon is emerging beyond today’s AI race?
Quantum computing is moving from theory to near-term demonstration. IBM expects to achieve quantum advantage by next year and aims to deliver a new system by 2029. Startups like IonQ say they are even further ahead. If successful, quantum systems could accelerate drug discovery, materials science, and complex optimization problems that classical computing cannot handle. The next wave of computation is already forming as AI infrastructure accelerates.
The full episode breaks down the evidence and what the shifts mean for supply chains, investors, and regional competitiveness.
Listen to the podcast for the complete briefing.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten minute executive briefing. It is an AI powered signal over noise for global investors and decision makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
From Taipei, where the world’s chips are born, we decode the week’s biggest semiconductor shifts. This episode examines a new frontier in the global AI supply chain. It is no longer about GPUs alone. It is about the electricity, cooling, and infrastructure required to run them. Taiwan sits at the center of this transition, shaping both the hardware and the systems that will define the next decade of AI.
Q: Why is energy becoming the new bottleneck in the AI supply chain?
OpenAI is reportedly exploring plans for 250 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2033. That is enough electricity to power India and would require 60 million units of Nvidia’s GB200 GPUs over several upgrade cycles. Deloitte notes that AI workloads are doubling energy consumption, pushing data centers past thermal limits. Electricity prices in the United States have risen 267 percent since 2019. The industry is hitting a thermal wall, where traditional cooling no longer works, and new infrastructure becomes essential.
Q: How is Taiwan responding to this energy and infrastructure challenge?
Cloud Leopard Energy doubled revenue through long-term renewable contracts with companies such as ASE Technology. To solve intermittency, it is investing in large-scale battery storage. Taiwan’s ODM leaders are also securing multi-year AI server orders. Quanta has visibility through 2027 with triple-digit AI server growth. Gigabyte’s order book extends through 2026. These commitments indicate that global cloud providers are locking in Taiwan’s capacity for years ahead.
Q: Why is Taiwan considered the epicenter of the next AI hardware wave?
Deloitte’s 2025 Global TMT Outlook cites generative AI and geopolitics as the two forces reshaping supply chains. Taiwan leads in advanced packaging technologies such as CoWoS and sits at the strategic intersection of U.S. and global cloud expansion. To maintain this lead, Taiwan is investing in silicon photonics, quantum technology, and other frontier domains aligned with its New Ten AI Initiatives. The competition is increasingly about talent and R&D depth, rather than assembly scale alone.
Listen to the full episode of Inside Taiwan for a ten-minute briefing on how power, cooling, and infrastructure are becoming the defining constraints of the AI century, and how Taiwan’s supply chain is responding with speed and scale.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It is an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
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#TaiwanSemiconductor #AIsupplychain #GlobalChipManufacturing #TSMC #Nvidia #AIservers #CoWoS #AdvancedPackaging #AIenergy #LiquidCooling #HVDC #SovereignAI #AIInfrastructure #GlobalSupplyChain #TechGeopolitics
This week, one number stunned economists: Taiwan’s exports surged nearly 50% year-on-year to a record US$61.8 billion, driven by the global AI buildout. Behind that headline lies both the momentum and the pressure of an industry racing against time.
Q: Why are Taiwan’s exports rising so fast?
AI hardware and semiconductor shipments surged—up 140% and 28% respectively—accounting for almost 80% of total growth, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Finance. For the first time since 2003, the United States has overtaken China as Taiwan’s top export market, showing a deeper alignment with the U.S. AI ecosystem. TSMC, ASE Technology, and Chroma ATE are leading this acceleration through new alliances in advanced 3D IC manufacturing, an industry projected to reach US$79 billion by 2030.
Q: How is the global AI supply chain shifting?
Beijing is ordering state-funded data centers to use only domestic AI chips, effectively removing Nvidia from the market where it once held 95% share. Meanwhile, Jensen Huang confirmed Nvidia will not ship its next-generation Blackwell chips to China, prioritizing compliance with U.S. export policy. Taiwan, on the other hand, launched its Ten Major AI Infrastructure Projects, aiming to generate US$500 billion in value by 2040 through breakthroughs in silicon photonics, quantum computing, and AI robotics.
Q: Can Taiwan’s energy system sustain the AI boom?
Each new TSMC fab consumes enormous power, and Taiwan’s renewable share remains below 12% despite a 15% target. The Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association has warned of an energy crunch that could slow production. With Apple and Nvidia committed to 100% renewable energy, and the EU’s carbon border rules taxing high-emission products, Taiwan’s green transition has become a core competitiveness issue.
Q: What does this mean for the global chip economy?
Taiwan’s semiconductor expansion is driving the AI era but also testing its limits. The world’s supply chain now depends on whether Taiwan can scale its manufacturing, manage its energy transition, and maintain geopolitical balance. It’s a story of speed, scarcity, and strategic adaptation at the center of global technology and power.
Listen to the full episode of Inside Taiwan, the AI-powered podcast decoding how Taiwan’s semiconductor engine is shaping the future of AI manufacturing and global trade.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It’s an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
AI’s Power-Hungry Reality: When Vision Outruns Infrastructure
Q: What happens when vision meets reality in the AI supply chain?
The AI boom is redrawing budgets and borders. TSMC has approved a US $15 billion capital budget to expand its most advanced 3-nanometer and 2-nanometer fabs, along with new CoWoS packaging plants that link CPUs, GPUs, and memory at lightning speed. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang personally visited TSMC to request additional capacity, showing how tight advanced-node supply has become. This is not hype; it is a long-term commitment to the physical foundation of AI.
Q: How is the AI boom testing Asia’s infrastructure limits? A new Cisco AI Readiness Index shows that while nearly half of Taiwanese companies expect AI workloads to rise by more than 50 percent, 61 percent admit their power infrastructure is inadequate. Only 39 percent have systems ready to manage energy efficiently, compared with 96 percent among global AI leaders. Taiwan’s chipmaking strength now faces a new bottleneck: electricity. The best chips in the world still need stable power and data pipelines to run.
Q: How can Taiwan and its neighbors stay ahead in the AI race? TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix continue to expand at record speed, but the next frontier is sustainability. As COP30 opens, policymakers are linking the AI manufacturing boom with the global energy transition. Real transformation requires more than innovation. It requires infrastructure, coordination, and time.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It is an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
#AITaiwan #SemiconductorTrend #GlobalSupplyChain #TSMC #CoWoS #Nvidia #AIManufacturing #AIInfrastructure #CiscoAIReadiness #EnergyTransition #COP30 #AsiaTech #InsideTaiwan
The Reality Check: Why Advanced Chipmaking Still Belongs to Asia
As Double 11 shatters e-commerce records across Asia, the real winners are the chipmakers powering the AI engines behind every recommendation, transaction, and the rise of a new industrial economy built on silicon and data.
Q: Why is the AI manufacturing boom still centered in Asia?
Even with record subsidies, the world’s most advanced manufacturing capacity has not shifted. Building a chip ecosystem takes decades of capital, engineering talent, and supplier depth. These foundations remain firmly anchored in Taiwan and Korea.
Q: How are Taiwan and Korea expanding their lead?
Asia’s industrial engine is still accelerating. TSMC is preparing a large-scale build-out of new wafer and packaging plants, while SK Hynix and Samsung are scaling high-bandwidth memory production for NVIDIA’s AI chips. The region continues to set the pace for both logic and memory innovation.
Q: Why the AI supply chain matters for COP30 and the global energy transition
The semiconductor race mirrors the climate challenge, where ambitious goals meet physical limits. As world leaders open COP30 to discuss decarbonization, the energy demand from fabs and data centers highlights how every leap in intelligence depends on power. Asia’s manufacturing story reminds us that real transformation, whether in compute or clean energy, requires more than policy. It requires infrastructure.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It’s an AI-powered signal-over-noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
#AITaiwan #SemiconductorTrend #GlobalSupplyChain #TSMC #Samsung #SKHynix #AIFactories #AIEconomy #EnergyTransition #COP30 #AsiaTech #InsideTaiwan
Q: What happens when the six architects of modern AI gather in one room?
They don’t talk hype, they talk infrastructure.
In a rare conversation among the winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Bill Dally revealed a shared vision: AI is becoming a new kind of industrial base, one powered by computation, not coal.
Q: Why Power and Compute Are Becoming the Next AI Bottleneck
According to media report, U.S. grid operator PJM faces 32 GW of new demand from data centers by 2030—equivalent to dozens of new power plants. Energy firms like NRG Energy are raising forecasts; Google is building data centers on remote islands to secure renewable power. The AI boom isn’t just straining silicon. it’s redefining energy geopolitics.
Q: What Makes Taiwan Critical to the Global Chip Economy
TSMC’s advanced nodes remain the keystone of global compute. Every major player—from NVIDIA to Teslai—is chasing Taiwan’s precision, even as they race to build domestic alternatives. This competition is rewriting the global supply map: chips, energy, and intelligence are now one integrated value chain.
Listen to the full episode of Inside Taiwan — the AI-powered daily podcast delivering signal over noise on the ‘why’ behind the world’s most valuable supply chain.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing.
It’s an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
Q1: Where is the real battle for AI dominance being fought?
The center of gravity in AI has shifted from software to silicon. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son reportedly explored a $100 billion takeover of Marvell, the U.S. chip designer behind key AI networking chips for Amazon Web Services. The move would have given SoftBank control not only of Arm’s CPU architecture but also of the data-center hardware where AI runs. The plan was halted, but the message was clear: in the AI economy, manufacturing is strategy.
Q2: Why are chip bottlenecks deepening despite record investment?
The world’s semiconductor capacity boom has not solved the scarcity problem—it has moved it. Tesla’s next-gen AI5 chip, built by TSMC and Samsung, has been pushed to 2027, revealing global shortages in advanced packaging. Nexperia, owned by China’s Wingtech, warned it could not guarantee chip quality packaged in China after October 2025, following Dutch state intervention. Meanwhile, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and JSR, which control over 90% of the global photoresist market, are investing hundreds of millions in new 2-nanometer material capacity. The chokepoints of the global supply chain now lie in chemistry, not circuits.
Q3: How is AI transforming the global energy equation?
AI’s physical hunger is now measured in gigawatts. Babcock & Wilcox signed a $1.5 billion contract to build a 1-GW gas-fired plant—enough to power 750,000 homes—to serve one AI data center. After two decades of flat demand, U.S. electricity use is projected to surge by 2028, driven largely by data-center expansion. In response, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs introduced new Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rules to improve data-center efficiency. Meta has purchased 3 GW of renewables this year, while Google’s Project Suncatcher plans to launch orbital solar-powered AI data centers by 2027. The race for AI dominance is becoming a race for sustainable power.
Q4: What drives Taiwan’s semiconductor growth amid the global supply chain realignment?
Despite rising geopolitical risks, Taiwan’s outlook remains strong. KGI Investment revised profit forecasts for local chipmakers upward by 22% for 2026, while global chip capex is set to reach $200 billion with over 25% allocated to Taiwan. As U.S. cloud providers expand capital spending by 30% next year, the ripple effects strengthen Taiwan’s ecosystem—from wafers to cooling systems. What the world calls the global supply chain, Taiwan calls home.
Listen to the full episode: Inside Taiwan — How the Taiwan Semiconductor Trend Is Redefining the Global Supply Chain.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It’s an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
Every tech revolution starts with a dream — and ends with a reckoning.
Today’s AI boom looks unstoppable. Trillions in capital are chasing the same promise: whoever builds true Artificial General Intelligence first will own the next century of technology. But beneath the excitement lies an uncomfortable truth — bubbles don’t feel like bubbles until they burst.
This week’s episode of Inside Taiwan explores the paradox at the heart of the AI frenzy. Why are investors pouring billions into a market that even its own pioneers call a “bubble”? What will actually remain when the hype fades — and who will hold the power?
From Sam Altman’s secretive chip diplomacy in Taipei and Seoul to Beijing’s push for a self-reliant AI stack and Washington’s geopolitical chip lines, the race is evolving fast. Taiwan, meanwhile, is quietly building the scaffolding of this new world order — advanced packaging, data-center cooling, and the infrastructure that makes AI physically possible.
If the dot-com bust left us with the internet’s backbone, this AI wave might leave us with the foundations of the next industrial revolution — one powered not by oil or code, but by intelligence itself.
Listen to the full episode of Inside Taiwan to understand how power, politics, and profit are colliding in the world’s most valuable supply chain.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AGI #TechGeopolitics #Semiconductors #OpenAI #TSMC #EnergyTransition #DataCenters #AIRevolution #Innovation #GlobalEconomy #SupplyChain #TechnologyLeadership #InsideTaiwan【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It’s an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
For months, the world has obsessed over the “chip war” — who can build the fastest, smallest, and smartest silicon. But the next great AI battle won’t be fought in clean rooms. It’ll be fought in power plants.
A leaked OpenAI letter to the White House revealed an uncomfortable truth: America will need to double its annual electricity generation just to keep pace with AI growth — 100 gigawatts a year, twice the entire capacity added in 2024. China, meanwhile, added more than four times that amount. The global race for AI dominance has quietly become a race for energy security.
From Microsoft’s $15.2 billion data-center investment in the UAE to China subsidizing electricity for ByteDance and Alibaba, every major player now faces the same constraint — not compute, but current. And behind every transistor and every model sits a nation scrambling for control of the grid.
In Taiwan, the story evolves differently. While the world worries about power, TSMC is re-architecting the physical limits of silicon with its CoWoS packaging — stacking chips like skyscrapers and shaping what many now call its “second moat.” It’s a reminder that in the AI era, true advantage comes not just from speed, but from the ability to reshape the entire supply chain.
This week’s episode of Inside Taiwan dives deep into how energy, materials, and innovation collide to define the next phase of AI power — literal and geopolitical.
Listen to the full episode to understand why the real AI revolution begins long before the data ever reaches the chip.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It’s an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
Five trillion dollars.
That’s how high Nvidia’s valuation briefly soared this week—more than the GDP of Japan.
But behind that headline number lies something much bigger: the quiet formation of a new global order for technology itself.
We are entering an AI industrial revolution, and the real story isn’t just about who builds the smartest chips.
It’s about where they’re built, who controls the ingredients, and how nations are redrawing the map of power.
Here’s what’s changing:
Nvidia’s Blackwell chips—its fastest yet—are now in full production in Arizona, built in record time with TSMC and Foxconn.
It’s the first time America is manufacturing top-tier AI hardware at home, a move that blends technology and national security.
As Jensen Huang put it, “control and security” now matter as much as performance.
The HBM gold rush has begun.
Think of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) as the supercharged short-term memory of every AI brain.
SK Hynix, South Korea’s quiet powerhouse, now holds a commanding lead—its profits projected to surpass TSMC’s next year, with margins above 60%.
Memory prices are soaring, and what analysts once called a “winter” has turned into a full-blown supercycle.
Japan’s silent comeback is unfolding upstream.
Instead of chasing chip fabs, Tokyo is locking down what chips can’t exist without:
photoresists, silicon wafers, and packaging materials.
Government-backed funds have taken control of JSR, Shinko Electric, and Sumco, securing the chemicals and substrates that fuel the world’s most advanced chips.
Japan isn’t competing to be visible—it’s making itself indispensable.
Together, these moves reveal a pattern:
The global tech supply chain is fragmenting and reassembling into strategic alliances, built not just on profit, but on power, resilience, and trust.
And right at the center of it all sits Taiwan—the quiet hub linking every node in this trillion-dollar circuit.
Why it matters:
This isn’t just a semiconductor story.
It’s the foundation of the next economy—where capital, computation, and capability converge.
For investors, this is where the next decade’s value will be created.
For professionals, it’s where industries, skills, and influence are being rewritten in real time.
Listen to Inside Taiwan, the AI-powered podcast decoding how nations, companies, and people are competing to build the future—chip by chip.
【About the Show】
Inside Taiwan distills 200 stories a day from over 30 trusted Traditional Chinese and English sources into a ten-minute executive briefing. It’s an AI-powered signal over noise for global investors and decision-makers navigating the world’s most valuable supply chain.
#AI #Semiconductors #Nvidia #TSMC #SKHynix #Japan #HBM #Geopolitics #SupplyChain #Technology #AIeconomy #InsideTaiwan
Contact Us: hello@kimfionlab.com
AI isn’t just code anymore — it’s in earnings, factories, and national strategies.
In the latest episode of Inside Taiwan, we unpack the signals behind Apple and Amazon’s strong results, Korea’s 260 K-GPU “AI factory” plan, and NVIDIA’s five-trillion-dollar surge — and why every one of them points to Taiwan’s expanding role at the heart of the global AI supply chain.
We connect the dots from capex to capacity, from power grids to packaging — revealing how hardware, energy, and policy are now the real competitive edges in the AI era.
🎙️ Tune in for a data-driven view of where the next trillion dollars of AI investment will flow — and how Taiwan quietly anchors it.
Five trillion. One trillion.
Those aren’t sci-fi numbers — they’re the new market caps defining the AI era.
In the latest episode of Inside Taiwan, we explore whether today’s trillion-dollar valuations mark the start of a bubble or the birth of a new industrial revolution.
From OpenAI’s IPO ambitions to NVIDIA’s meteoric rise, this isn’t just a tech story — it’s a geopolitical chess game where supply chains, national security, and innovation collide.
🎙️ I break down what’s real, what’s hype, and what investors should be watching — especially as Taiwan remains the quiet heartbeat of this global transformation.
👉 Tune in to Inside Taiwan for context that moves faster than the headlines — insights designed for decision-makers, not just spectators.
Contact Us: hello@kimfionlab.com
There are two sides to every revolution.
On one side: NVIDIA setting up a new base in Taipei, crossing a $5 trillion valuation, and redefining what global AI leadership looks like.
On the other: tens of thousands of white-collar layoffs, as companies cite AI efficiency as the reason for restructuring.
This week on Inside Taiwan, we explore how the world’s most valuable chipmaker and its partners are redrawing the global supply chain — and what this means for the people powering it.
From NVIDIA’s new Taipei HQ to Wenyee’s $3.8B acquisition that turned it into the world’s largest IC distributor, and Amazon’s new wave of AI-driven job cuts — we look at the two forces shaping this era: creation and displacement.
The question isn’t whether AI will change everything.
It’s whether we can build the bridges fast enough for people to cross from the old economy to the new.
🎧 Listen to EP17: Two Sides of the AI Revolution — now streaming on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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A trillion-dollar power shift is underway in the world of AI chips — and this week, the fault lines moved.
In this episode of Inside Taiwan, host Fiona Chou breaks down Tesla’s landmark $16.5 billion AI-chip partnership with Samsung — a move that could reshape the semiconductor supply chain and challenge TSMC’s dominance.
From Seoul to Silicon Valley, we trace how this deal signals a new era of AI manufacturing diversification, the rise of system-level competition, and the ripple effects now reaching the global economy.
We’ll also look at Qualcomm’s push into AI inference, Amazon’s white-collar layoffs in response to automation, and why the next phase of the AI revolution isn’t just digital — it’s structural, societal, and geopolitical.
Inside Taiwan connects the dots between chips, capital, and culture — revealing how Taiwan’s role at the center of the AI supply chain is shaping the future of global power.
The narrative around AI often focuses on model releases and product demos. But the real story is unfolding deeper in the stack: the physical, national, and computational infrastructure that determines who will lead the next era of technology.
This week on Inside Taiwan, four developments reveal how quickly the landscape is shifting.
In Seoul, Samsung crossed the 100,000-won milestone, driven by High-Bandwidth Memory demand and renewed confidence in Chairman Lee Jae-yong’s “New Samsung” strategy. The company is positioning itself at the core of AI memory, an area that increasingly defines system-level performance.
In the United States, Lumen and Palantir announced a multi-year partnership designed to rebuild digital infrastructure for the AI era. As bandwidth becomes a strategic bottleneck, pairing physical fiber networks with real-time AI analytics turns network intelligence into a defensible edge.
Meanwhile, an analysis of China’s “Made in China 2025” framework shows how state-backed industrial policy can reshape global power. With major milestones already achieved across EVs, batteries, solar, and drones, the lesson is clear: patient capital at national scale can compress decades of development into a single cycle.
And in California, Google’s Quantum AI team demonstrated a breakthrough that reframes the horizon entirely. Their Willow chip solved a calculation that would take the fastest supercomputer an estimated 10 septillion years. Quantum computing will not replace AI; it will amplify it, accelerating materials science, drug discovery, and encryption challenges previously considered intractable.
Taken together, these signals point to a new phase of competition. Leadership will not be decided by any single layer. It will come from integrated strength across:
• Advanced memory and packaging
• Data movement and network intelligence
• National industrial strategy
• Next-generation compute paradigms
This is a full-stack race. The outcomes will define both economic power and technological sovereignty.
#InsideTaiwan #Semiconductors #HBM #AdvancedPackaging #QuantumComputing #Infrastructure #IndustrialPolicy #ChinaTech #Palantir #Lumen #Samsung #TSMC #AIAcceleration #Geopolitics #SupplyChain
Tesla confirmed that its next-generation AI chip will be manufactured by both TSMC and Samsung. This marks a meaningful shift in how the industry thinks about risk, capacity, and geographic concentration.
For the past decade, the default strategy for the most advanced chips has been single-sourcing through TSMC. Their technical leadership, operational discipline, and economics made the decision straightforward.
However, as AI accelerates from early adoption into industrial deployment, the assumptions behind single sourcing are changing. The industry is entering a period defined by diversification, system-level performance, and geographic hedging.
Samsung is attempting a return to the highest tier of manufacturing with aggressive pricing on its 2 nm node and visible improvements in yield. Early indications suggest long-term contracts with Apple, Tesla, and IBM. Its expanding manufacturing footprint in Texas provides proximity advantages that matter at scale.
TSMC is responding by moving beyond transistor-level leadership toward system-level performance through advanced packaging such as CoWoS and SoIC. This approach reduces the bottlenecks between memory and logic and maintains margin strength even as the cost of new fabs rises.
Above them sits ASML, whose EUV platform remains a geopolitical chokepoint. Export controls determine where advanced capacity can be deployed, shaping the geography of the AI era.
Pressure is also cascading into unexpected parts of the stack. High-bandwidth memory shortages are pulling Samsung back into a competitive position. Even passive components and PCBs are showing pricing pressure as capacity tightens.
This is not a story about a single winner. It is a reconfiguration of the entire ecosystem.
This week on Inside Taiwan, we cover:
• Why Tesla is hedging across TSMC and Samsung
• Samsung’s credibility recovery at 2 nm
• TSMC’s shift to system-level optimization
• ASML’s gatekeeping role in advanced capacity
• Downstream pricing pressure in foundational components
The semiconductor supply chain is entering a more complex and strategically distributed phase. The decisions being made now will shape the industrial footprint of AI for the next decade.
Listen to EP14. The Chip Power Shift: Tesla Hedging Between TSMC and Samsung.
Contact Us: hello@kimfionlab.com
#InsideTaiwan #Semiconductors #TSMC #Samsung #ASML #Tesla #HBM #AIChips #AdvancedPackaging #SupplyChain #Geopolitics #Nvidia #Foundry2_0
From the data center to the trading floor — the AI revolution is becoming real.
In this week’s Inside Taiwan, I explore two stories that reveal how fast the next industrial era is being built:
🔹 CoreWeave’s CEO Mike Intrator explains the “relentless demand” for AI compute — and why he says this isn’t a bubble, but the start of a new economic infrastructure.
🔹 OpenAI’s “Project Mercury” aims to train models on Wall Street workflows — automating the 100-hour weeks of junior bankers to free them for strategy and creativity.
Together, they show how AI’s physical railroads and digital economies are forming in real time.
🎧 Listen: EP13. From Servers to Wall Street: Inside AI’s Next Industrial Revolution
If every nation wants to be an AI superpower… who actually controls the keys?
Every country wants its own AI.
It’s called Sovereign AI — the idea that true national independence in the next industrial era depends on owning your own AI stack, not renting it from Silicon Valley.
But here’s the catch: building it means navigating an impossible supply chain controlled by a handful of players — Nvidia, TSMC, and ASML.
In this week’s Inside Taiwan, I break down the global race for AI sovereignty — and why every road leads back to Taiwan:
🔹 How TSMC became the single most critical player in the global AI arms race.
🔹 Why Nvidia’s moat isn’t just hardware — it’s the software empire behind CUDA.
🔹 The trillion-dollar paradox: nations chasing independence while relying on the same bottlenecks.
🔹 And how AI’s economic model crisis is forcing even OpenAI to rethink its principles.
🎧 Listen: “Sovereign AI: The Global Power Race—and Why It All Leads Back to Taiwan”
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