On June 4, Taiwan announced a programme that would attract international enterprises to partner with local ones for joint investment in the R&D of next-generation technologies. The scheme is to be driven by government subsidies. Clearly it¡¯s to be a classic win-win arrangement, with foreign companies benefitting financially, and Taiwan¡¯s extensive network of electronics and semiconductor businesses seeing further development of local talent. The programme was officially announced by Chuan-neng Lin, Vice Minister for Economic Affairs.
Broadly, the expectation is that the programme will attract US$1.34 billion, or some NT$40 billion (New Taiwan dollars), in R&D investment by overseas tech companies. If all goes according to plan, that will result in the creation of more than 6,300 jobs a year. To bring this ambitious project to fruition, Taiwan intends to spend over NT$10 billion (US$334.2 million) in subsidies over the next seven years, focusing on three key areas of technological development ¨C 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and semiconductors.
These foci are of course intimately interlinked. The future of AI is closely dependent on the development of a new generation of semiconductor chips that can ¡°machine learn¡± and ¡°inference¡± decisions at lightning-fast speed. The application of AI in real-world scenarios, in say the design of self-driving cars, is then dependent on communications in extremely close to real time, meaning 5G.
It¡¯s really no surprise that Taiwan is already in discussions with foreign enterprises ¨C details not yet available ¨C when the island is home to global semicon leader TSMC, as well as a fascinating mosaic of ICT, electronics and other chip design-and-manufacturing companies, of all shapes and sizes. At the same time, Taiwan will be trying to lure much of its own home-grown technology base back across the Taiwan Strait from manufacturing investments on the mainland.
