Controversy Does Not Affect AI Demand
National Science and Technology Council Minister Wu Cheng-wen today attended the "Building Taiwan's AI Innovation Ecosystem" results presentation, and responded after the meeting to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang being embroiled in an extramarital affair and national security questions, and the U.S. considering tighter chip export controls after the midterm elections. He said he personally does not know the details of the related incidents, but judging from current industry development, he does not believe it will affect human society's demand for AI, and technology companies around the world all see the continued development trend of AI, with AI still in the early stage of application.
Stock Volatility Is a Short-Term Phenomenon
In response to recent sharp stock market fluctuations, Wu Cheng-wen stressed it is only a short-term phenomenon, and the government's confidence in AI industry development has not changed. Next year's general government budget has already earmarked funding to continue promoting Taiwan's sovereign AI development, not only for use by the technology industry, but further introducing AI into all industries to assist industrial transformation and upgrading, especially with huge demand remaining in smart manufacturing, and related model and investment plans will not stop because of this.
Continued Investment in Sovereign AI Computing Power
Wu Cheng-wen pointed out that AI development requires a large amount of computing power, and government-invested computing power is mainly built and operated by the National High-Performance Computing Center. In the past the government promoted the TAIDE sovereign AI model, this year it is further developing new models, continuously improving model capabilities through local-language corpora, and will release them for industry use in the future, driving the supply chain through the technology industry to gradually build Taiwan's AI ecosystem, and will continue to strengthen investment in sovereign AI computing power in the future.
Strict U.S. Controls Have Limited Impact
Wu Cheng-wen said global dependence on Taiwan's semiconductors and AI computing equipment is quite high, and although there are many international trade control regulations, Taiwan will abide by international order and cooperate with the United States. U.S. companies are important customers of Taiwan, and business is not limited to the Taiwan market; as long as relevant control regulations are not violated, related business has not been affected so far. Regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power in the United States, cooperation with Taiwan remains consistent, and current Republican administration control measures are already quite strict without relaxation, so related policy changes have limited impact on Taiwan's industrial development.