Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was again at the center of Computex, Asia's largest IT and computing trade show, this year. Crowds flocked wherever he appeared, and global reporters followed. But what we confirmed on the ground was not just Jensen Huang's personal influence. Nvidia's artificial intelligence (AI) chips are produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), and many of the servers equipped with them are also made by Taiwanese corporations. Behind Jensen Huang's presence was Taiwan's semiconductor ecosystem, positioned at the heart of the global AI supply chain.
When talking about Taiwanese semiconductors, the first corporation that comes to mind is TSMC. TSMC's role in the global AI Semiconductor supply chain is overwhelming. However, the competitiveness of Taiwan confirmed at this Computex was hard to explain with just a single corporation. Across Nangang Exhibition Center were packaging corporations such as ASE, substrate companies like Unimicron, and server manufacturers such as Foxconn, Quanta, and Wistron. Their fields were different, but they were ultimately tightly linked as one supply chain.
What stood out in particular were the back-end process and AI infrastructure. In the semiconductor industry, the importance of advanced packaging is growing rapidly. As it becomes harder to keep improving performance through process scaling alone, chip interconnect technology and thermal management capabilities have emerged as new strengths. At Computex, corporations featuring advanced packaging and liquid cooling technologies occupied prime exhibition space. At the forefront of a show once centered on PCs were AI servers, packaging, and cooling technologies. It was a snapshot showing that the scope of semiconductor competition is expanding beyond the chip itself to the entire system.
Taiwan's strength lay in the supply chain itself, beyond any single corporation. Centered on TSMC, packaging, substrates, server manufacturing, and electronic component corporations have grown together to build a dense ecosystem. AI Semiconductor is not complete with design and production alone. Only when packaging, substrates, and server manufacturing are organically linked does it become a single product. Taiwan's advantage is that the corporations needed for this process are clustered in one place. The reason global Big Tech corporations come to Taiwan is not just the technical prowess of individual companies. It is because Taiwan has the industrial base where all the partners needed for mass production can be met in one place.
This is also the backdrop for Computex's elevated status. Once a PC parts show, Computex has transformed into an event where CEOs of global semiconductor corporations such as Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel gather. It is the result of Taiwan concentrating the core value chain from AI Semiconductor production to packaging and server manufacturing. At the root of Computex's rise as a signature industry event of the AI era is, ultimately, Taiwan's ecosystem.
Korea has world-class semiconductor corporations in Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. It is particularly unrivaled in memory. Taiwan is similar in that it moves around a dominant leader, TSMC. The decisive difference, however, is that packaging, substrates, and server manufacturing corporations closely support it. If Korean semiconductors have led the market with the singular competitiveness of individual corporations, Taiwan has cultivated the connectivity and division of labor across the entire supply chain as its strength.
Throughout Computex, Jensen Huang and global Big Tech corporations drew attention, but what ultimately brought them to Taiwan was the Taiwanese supply chain that filled Nangang Exhibition Center. In the AI Semiconductor market, leadership is no longer maintained by design assets or process scaling technology alone. Competitiveness is only complete when the entire process—making chips, packaging them, and finishing with server systems—meshes organically. A supply chain that starts with TSMC and extends through packaging, substrates, and server manufacturing. This Computex was a site that showed where the strength of Taiwan's semiconductor industry comes from.