Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Simon Liu/Office of the President/CC BY 2.0
NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG is having a moment in Taiwan. In particular, Huang has been widely praised in Taiwan after a speech in which he declared that the world was on the precipice of a new Industrial Revolution–involving AI–and that Taiwan was key to this. This occurred on the occasion of a keynote speech by Huang at Computex, one of the major annual tech exhibitions in Taiwan.
Huang, who was one of Nvidia’s founders, has been chief executive of the company for over three decades. While Huang does not often return to Taiwan, his trips to Taiwan are often scrutinized for where he travels. A significant degree of media reporting during his trip focused on when he visits night markets and other regular places, as if to show that Huang–who was born in Taiwan but grew up in the US and has spent most of his life abroad–has maintained ties with his native land.
Huang’s background proves similar to that of many other Taiwanese tech entrepreneurs who, in fact, have spent most of their lives abroad. Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, also has spent most of his life in the US and seems to identify as an American as a result.
Nevertheless, this has long been the pattern in Taiwan, with educated elites going abroad to America. Consequently, Taiwanese media often fawns over such figures when they return to Taiwan.
Huang’s speech on the importance of Taiwan for AI sent Taiwan’s stock market up 362 points on the promise of AI development. Certainly, AI is one of the global buzzwords at present. Newly inaugurated president Lai Ching-te’s initial cabinet, for example, was termed an “AI cabinet”–though AI here stood for “active and innovative.” At the same time, promises by Lai and other presidential candidates to stimulate AI development and keep Taiwan in the global limelight were a refrain of the 2024 election cycle.
Jensen Huang (left). Photo credit: European Union/CC BY 4.0
Yet it proves telling as to Taiwan’s contested fate in the world that its economy could be so influenced by the words of a single “captain of industry.” In this sense, the pageantry around Huang reflects desperation for survival for Taiwan, and praise for Huang is because he says what Taiwanese want to hear–that Taiwan is crucial to the world and so must be defended from China.
Indeed, it likely has come as somewhat of a surprise to observe how much international attention there has been on Taiwan in past years. After all, since the economic and political rise of China, Taiwan has often struggled under the shadow of its much larger neighbor. But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant sudden awareness that the world came to that it is reliant on Taiwanese semiconductors, this has put Taiwan on the world stage and restored a sense of confidence.
With this sense of confidence has come anxiety, that is, fear that Taiwan’s moment in the limelight will be limited. As such, there have been further calls for stimulating tech development in Taiwan, so that Taiwan is not left behind, that the world eventually loses interest in Taiwan, and no longer feels investment in defending it from China.
To this extent, while effusive praise of captains of industry–seeing them in terms of their individual genius–is something that occurs the world over, it takes on particular dimensions in Taiwan. This occurs in the means by which they are seen as fighting for Taiwan on the world stage and defending it from threats. Such is the case with Huang, as with Morris Chang, Robert Tsao, and many others, ultimately returning to Taiwan’s precarious geopolitical status.
This proves ironic, then, when the political interest of such tech magnates sometimes is not the same as that of the Taiwanese public itself, and their concerns can be quite remote from everyday concerns. Huang, after all, was likely hoping to drum up publicity for Nvidia in Taiwan and secure advantages from building a base in Taiwan, much as TSMC has leveraged on the popular desire to keep it in Taiwan to maintain Taiwan’s “silicon shield” in order to secure advantages in Taiwan that it would not be able to secure elsewhere. So, too, with Nvidia, and in drumming up publicity, Huang has been able to capitalize on Taiwan’s geopolitical desire to attract large tech companies, likely with the aim of securing similar advantages for Nvidia.