[Taiwan Chip News] NVIDIA to Establish Taiwan R&D Base Within 5 Years... "Hiring 1,000 Engineers"

1 Trillion Investment... Chip Design, AI, and Software R&D
Industry-Academia-Research Collaboration and Job Guarantees... Strengthening Taiwan Supply Chain

NVIDIA announced plans to build a research and development (R&D) center in Taiwan within five years and hire more than 1,000 engineers. With NVIDIA's entry, Taiwan's semiconductor supply chain, which possesses comprehensive capabilities in design, manufacturing, and post-processing, is expected to become even stronger.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, is delivering a keynote speech at an event held on the 2nd at the National Taiwan University Sports Center in Taipei, ahead of the opening of Computex 2024, Asia's largest IT exhibition.
[Photo by AFP Yonhap News]

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), revealed on the 4th (local time) that the R&D center construction project will commence soon. He also announced plans for large-scale hiring of engineers. The investment amount is approximately $715 million (about 1 trillion KRW). Huang stated that Taiwan has established a perfect semiconductor ecosystem as the reason for the investment. The center is likely to be located in one of Taiwan's major cities: Taipei, Tainan, or Kaohsiung.

CEO Huang noted that Taiwan is already a major hub for NVIDIA. During a global media Q&A session on the opening day of Computex held in Taiwan, when asked whether geopolitical risks concerning Taiwan were considered, he responded, "Taiwan is a place with an excellent and rich ecosystem," adding, "NVIDIA has tried to operate R&D centers with the same model as Taiwan in other regions, but it was very difficult."

He praised Taiwan's world-leading foundry, TSMC. He described it not just as a great company but an "amazing company." Huang said, "(TSMC) is an amazing company that makes not just good products but amazing products," and added, "It is a place with advanced technology, excellent work ethics, and outstanding flexibility, which is why NVIDIA and TSMC have been long-time partners collaborating for over 25 years." He further mentioned, "The two companies understand each other so deeply that words are almost unnecessary."

Huang explained that the reason NVIDIA and TSMC can rapidly mass-produce complex products is due to their deep understanding and cooperative relationship. He especially praised TSMC's advanced packaging technology called 'Chip on Wafer on Substrate (CoWoS).' CoWoS is a packaging method that places memory and logic (non-memory) semiconductors on a silicon-based 'interposer' board instead of a printed circuit board (PCB). This method reduces mounting area compared to traditional methods, improves efficiency, and enhances chip-to-chip connection speeds, making it preferred in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry.

NVIDIA plans to accelerate local hiring in Taiwan and establish industry-academia-research collaboration systems. CEO Huang stated, "We plan to hire personnel in various fields such as chip design, system design, software engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI) research, and also operate AI research laboratories," adding, "We will conduct innovative research in cooperation with universities."

Huang highly praised Taiwan as an irreplaceable investment destination. Although South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix supply HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) semiconductor components to NVIDIA, there is no movement among major global semiconductor companies to establish large-scale R&D centers or research and production bases in South Korea. Huang said, "We currently have hundreds of personnel in Taipei and the Hsinchu Science Park," and added, "We plan to continue investing steadily in Taiwan."

South Korea is considered to lag behind Taiwan in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI) conditions in the semiconductor sector. This perception is shared not only by NVIDIA but also by major companies like Intel. Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CEO, did not attend the Intel AI Summit Seoul 2024 event held on the 5th, stating at the Computex 2024 press conference, "There is no one I want to meet in South Korea during this period," contrary to expectations. Instead, he hosted a banquet inviting executives from Taiwanese IT suppliers such as Foxconn (a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry), Acer, and Gigabyte.

Taiwan Economic Daily News ? Reporters Zhong Huiling and Lin Yilu / Translation by Asia Economy

※ This column is published through a strategic partnership between Asia Economy and Taiwan Economic Daily News.