US-based tech giant Google on Thursday said it would continue to invest in Taiwan, as it praised the contributions of its Taiwanese team to the latest Pixel 10 smartphone lineup.
Google’s research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan already has thousands of employees, and it is recruiting more to cover a broad range of technologies, including hardware, software and semiconductors, Google vice president for hardware Elmer Peng (彭昱鈞) told reporters.
The R&D team in Taiwan is the company’s largest outside the US, Peng said, adding that its ongoing recruitment campaign would target Taiwanese as well as foreign talent to help the company achieve its goal of developing a diversified range of products.
Photo: Reuters
“Google’s investments will allow the world to see the value of Taiwan’s talent,” Peng said.
In 2018, Google spent US$1.1 billion to acquire the original design manufacturing assets of Taiwanese smartphone brand HTC Inc (宏達電), which had previously produced Pixel phones on a contract basis.
HTC also sold part of its extended reality (XR) business to Google for US$250 million in February this year.
Google’s Taiwanese team has begun to play an increasingly important role in the company following the acquisition, Peng said.
He added that he hoped more suppliers would join the XR ecosystem.
Peng’s comments came after Google launched the latest Pixel 10 series — Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL and the foldable Pixel 10 Pro Fold.
The Pixel 10 lineup uses Google’s self-developed Tensor G5 processor, with production outsourced to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電).
The Tensor G5 chips are made on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process, its most advanced commercial chip.
The Tensor G5 processor is “our biggest upgrade yet and delivers a major performance boost” and “allows us to pack more transistors into the chip so it’s more powerful and efficient,” Google said.
Before the Pixel 10 lineup, Google had partnered with South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co to manufacture processors for its phones.
The four new Pixel models came with the latest version of Google’s on-device artificial intelligence — Gemini Nano — which the company says runs 2.6 times faster and twice as efficiently as their predecessors because of performance gains from the Tensor G5 processor.
The latest Pixel phones are equipped with “Voice Translate,” which provides near real-time translation in the speaker’s own voice in one of the supported languages: English to or from French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
The Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL will be available in Taiwan on Thursday next week, while the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is to hit stores on Oct. 9.
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