Key Points
- Google has opened its largest AI infrastructure hardware engineering center outside the U.S. in Taiwan.
- The move is seen as a strong show of confidence in Taiwan as a key technology partner.
- Taiwan is home to TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, which is crucial to the global AI industry.
- The new center will focus on integrating chips, including Google’s own TPUs, into servers.
Alphabet’s Google opened a new AI infrastructure hardware engineering center in Taiwan on Thursday. This is the company’s largest such facility outside of the United States. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, said the move shows confidence in the island as a trustworthy technology partner.
Taiwan is a global tech powerhouse, home to the world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC. The chips made by TSMC are used by companies like Nvidia, which are at the forefront of the global artificial intelligence boom.
Amid ongoing tensions with China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, the Taiwanese government has been eager to highlight its strong tech connections with U.S. companies. “This also allows the world to see that Taiwan is not only a vital part of the global technological supply chain, but also a key hub for building secure and trustworthy AI,” President Lai said at the center’s opening ceremony.
Raymond Greene, the top U.S. diplomat in Taipei, said the new Google engineering center reflects the deep partnership between the United States and Taiwan. “Building on this foundation of innovation, we are entering a new era of opportunity, a new golden age in U.S.-Taiwan economic relations,” he said.
The new center’s work will focus on integrating chips, including Google’s own TPU AI processors, onto motherboards and attaching them to servers, according to a Google executive. Google first established its Taiwan infrastructure engineering team in 2020 and has since tripled its size, with several hundred employees set to work at the new facility.
This is not Google’s only presence in Taiwan. The U.S. tech giant also runs two other centers on the island for developing consumer electronics hardware and has operated a data center there since 2013.
“This is not just an investment in an office, it’s an investment in an ecosystem, a testament to Taiwan’s place as an important centre for global AI innovation,” said Aamer Mahmood, a Google Cloud vice president.
