Building a resilient energy supply chain is crucial for Taiwan to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology and grow its economy, former Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger said yesterday.
Gelsinger, now a general partner at the US venture capital firm Playground Global LLC, was asked at a news conference in Taipei about his views on Taiwan’s hardware development and growing concern over an AI bubble.
“Today, the greatest issue in Taiwan isn’t even in the software or in architecture. It is energy,” Gelsinger said. “You are not in the position to have a resilient energy supply chain, and that, I think, puts your entire industry in a very precarious state. You need more energy resilience in Taiwan if you want to grow the economy of Taiwan.”
Photo: CNA
He said he did not expect the heavy AI infrastructure investments by the world’s major cloud service providers to cause an AI bubble burst soon.
“Maybe we’ll spend a couple of hundred million [US] dollars putting concrete in the base of building infrastructure. We will not spend billions of dollars on chips until we have energy availability,” he said. “And fundamentally, that becomes a buffer or a limiter.”
The AI industry is supported by solid business models to generate real profits, which is different from the dotcom bubble of 2000, he said.
Gelsinger said he is “supportive” of US President Donald Trump’s call for bringing more chip manufacturing to the US, as “everything rides on the foundations of semiconductors.”
“I believe that having more resilience of those supply chains is the best policy. For that, I’m very much supportive of the Trump administration wanting to see more built in the US,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s less in Taiwan. It just says more of a growth should occur in other geographies like the US.”
Gelsinger said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) should “have more advanced nodes, and more research and development in the US, because it simply is a better policy for the world.”
“It is so important to the future of the world,” he added.
Separately, former TSMC senior vice president Lo Wei-jen (羅唯仁), who retired in July, is expected to join Intel to help improve the US chipmaker’s foundry business, alarming authorities, local media reported.
The High Prosecutors’ Office yesterday opened an intellectual property theft investigation, while the Ministry of Economic Affairs approached TSMC to gain more understanding of the issue, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) reported.
Prosecutors suspect that Lo allegedly attempted to obtain sensitive information about TSMC’s most advanced process technologies, including 2-nanometer, 16A and 14A technologies, it reported.
Lo joined TSMC in 2004 from Intel, where he held various positions in technology development and management.
TSMC and Intel declined to comment.
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