The government aims to increase the nation’s electricity reserve margin from 7.5 percent to 15 percent by 2019, and up to 22 percent by 2025, as part of efforts to attract investment, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
“Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) has nine projects to increase electricity supply. We will ensure the state-run company finishes the projects on time to meet the government’s goal,” Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) told a media conference yesterday after a meeting with Premier William Lai (賴清德).
Shen briefed the ministry on the five main issues facing enterprises when investing in Taiwan, including constrained power and water supply, land and labor shortages, and a shortage of skilled workers.
“We need to work together to solve these issues to improve the nation’s investment environment and boost the economy,” Lai said before the briefing.
The ministry is to draft reward and punishment measures for Taipower, in a bid to push the firm to meet new power generator installation deadlines, Shen said.
Lai has requested that Taipower send the independent environmental impact assessment review committee the environmental impact assessments for the projects as early as it can to prevent any possible delays, Shen said.
The Water Resources Agency is to evaluate the feasibility of connecting the Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Hsinchu water supply systems to form a regional water supply network, Shen said.
The network might offer more flexibility in allocating water supplies to enterprises within the region, Shen said.
“The premier said if it is feasible, just do it,” Shen added.
The Industrial Development Bureau is to continue evaluating increasing the floor area ratio in industrial zones from 210 percent to 300 percent, Shen said.
The bureau will do more research on a buyback plan of idled plots across the nation before presenting a more detailed proposal to the premier in the next briefing, Shen said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
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