By Wen-Yee Lee
TAIPEI (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google opened a new AI infrastructure hardware engineering centre in Taiwan on Thursday – its biggest outside of the U.S. – in what Taiwan’s president said was a show of confidence in the island as a trustworthy technology partner.
The island is home to the world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC, whose chips are widely used by companies like Nvidia that are driving the global artificial intelligence boom.
Taiwan has been keen to tout its strong tech ties with U.S. companies amid tensions with China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own.
Taiwan’s government has also repeatedly warned of the risks involved in using Chinese-developed AI systems like DeepSeek, while China’s government has dismissed such concerns.
“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,” Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said at the centre’s opening ceremony.
Raymond Greene, the de facto U.S. ambassador in Taipei, said the new Google engineering centre 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 centre’s work will focus on integrating chips – including Google’s TPU AI processors – onto motherboards and attaching them to servers, said Greg Moore, Google Cloud’s director of platforms development.
Google established its Taiwan infrastructure engineering team in 2020 and said the team has since tripled in size, with several hundred staff set to be employed at the new centre.
The U.S. tech giant also operates two other centres in Taiwan that develop consumer electronics hardware and has run a data centre on the island since 2013. It has also invested in multiple international subsea cables.
“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, Google Cloud’s vice president of platforms infrastructure engineering.
(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Kevin Buckland and Edwina Gibbs)
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