Taiwan yesterday pledged to work closely with the US and other allies to prevent China’s military from acquiring state-of-the-art technology, as Washington steps up efforts to contain the world’s No. 2 economy.
Taiwan, home to the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, will keep its advanced chip development at home, while adopting measures to stop its tech from being used by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Chen Chern-chyi (陳正祺) said yesterday.
Chen said that while Taiwan’s economy would not be able to decouple from its biggest trade partner, it would implement “very firm” export controls to keep advanced technologies from China’s military.
Photo: Liao Chen-hui, Taipei Times
“With respect to national security, we will take measures to safeguard our trade secrets, safeguard our key technologies, safeguard our talent [so that they are] not poached illegally,” he said.
Taiwan investigated Alchip Technologies Inc (世芯) for allegedly supplying advanced supercomputer chips to China’s Phytium Information Technology Co (飛騰信息技術) — which some analysts have said has links to the Chinese military — and banned chip exports to Phytium, Chen said.
“Once we find a loophole, we plug it,” he said.
Phytium, which is affiliated with research arms of the Chinese military, relied on Alchip for certain designs, the Washington Post reported in April last year.
The Taiwanese company also dealt with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) for production on behalf of Phytium, it said.
The US eventually blacklisted Phytium, prompting Alchip to declare a suspension of shipments.
Regulators would also fine iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) for failing to report an acquisition by the company’s Shanghai-listed arm of a stake in China’s top chipmaker, state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup (清華紫光), he said.
Chen’s comments come as US President Joe Biden’s administration prepares new restrictions on chip exports to China, which would formalize export controls on the technology behind advanced semiconductors, while restricting access to chips used in supercomputing and artificial intelligence.
As the US seeks to limit access to cutting-edge technology while boosting its own domestic production capacity, Taiwan and fellow US allies South Korea and Japan have been forced to navigate increasingly incompatible business and security interests.
Taiwan will use the new US-led “Chip 4” group to safeguard the interests of Taiwanese companies and to ensure supply chain resilience, Chen said, although he added that the group had no agenda yet.
Taiwan’s position as a leader in semiconductor production remains vulnerable. Concern is growing in the US over its reliance on chip production in Taiwan, as China ramps up military threats toward the country.
With the implementation of the US$50 billion CHIPS Act, the US plans to cut its dependence on Taiwan for semiconductors over the next decade, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said last week.
Asked about the US wanting to reduce its reliance on manufacturing in Taiwan, Chen said Taiwan’s chip industry has a well-integrated supply chain and a very good workforce.
“From the government’s per-spective we think Taiwan’s advantage and Taiwan’s edge in developing the most advanced manufacturing technology will always be here in Taiwan,” he said.
However, the government is happy to see Taiwanese chip firms investing in like-minded countries, he added.
“We think that will only deepen and strengthen our relations,” Chen said.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
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
RSS