US chip designer Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) yesterday launched an office in Tainan’s Gueiren District (歸仁), marking a significant milestone in the development of southern Taiwan’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry, the Tainan City Government said in a statement.
AMD Taiwan general manager Vincent Chern (陳民皓) presided over the opening ceremony for the company’s new office at the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City (沙崙智慧綠能科學城), a new AI industry base and cybersecurity hub in southern Taiwan.
Facilities in the new office include an information processing center, and a research and development (R&D) center, the Tainan Economic Development Bureau said.
Photo courtesy of Tainan City Government
The Ministry of Economic Affairs in August last year confirmed that AMD would establish R&D centers in Tainan and Kaohsiung as part of the company’s efforts to accelerate the development of cutting-edge technologies such as AI and silicon photonics.
Also at the ceremony was Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲), Southern Taiwan Science Park Bureau Director-General Alice Cheng (鄭秀絨), Innolux Corp (群創) chairman Jim Hung (洪進揚) and S. Felix Wu (吳士駿), dean of the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at National Cheng Kung University.
Huang said that Tainan is at the core of the “S-shaped semiconductor industry corridor” in southern Taiwan and AMD’s presence in the Shalun technology complex demonstrates significant progress in the city’s AI development.
Tainan in the past few years has been focusing on the dual-engine development of Southern Taiwan Science Park (南部科學園區) and Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City to attract semiconductor, cybersecurity and AI businesses to drive the city’s economic development, the statement said.
The world’s five largest semiconductor equipment giants — Applied Materials Inc, ASML Holding NV, Tokyo Electron Ltd, Lam Research Corp and KLA-Tencor Corp — have established a presence in the Southern Taiwan Science Park, the statement said.
Together with major Taiwanese IC design companies such as MediaTek Inc (聯發科), Realtek Semiconductor Corp (瑞昱) and Novatek Microelectronics Corp (聯詠), the science park has developed into a crucial cluster for the advanced semiconductor industry, the statement added.
Revenue generated by firms in the Southern Taiwan Science Park (南部科學園區) grew 39.55 percent to a record-high NT$2.21 trillion (US$66.9 billion) last year, data released by the National Science and Technology Council on March 12 showed.
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