Four Asian Economies Carve Up the AI Supply Chain
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- Taiwan dominates production of the world's most advanced AI semiconductors through TSMC, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calling the island the 'epicenter' of the AI revolution during a recent visit.
- Taiwan's foreign minister declared in late 2025 that the most advanced chipmaking capabilities must remain in Taiwan, noting that TSMC's overseas facilities in Germany, Japan and the US do not produce leading-edge chips.
- South Korea's government, Samsung and SK Hynix announced a nearly US$600 billion (£446 billion) investment in two new chip manufacturing plants in the country's south-west.
- Samsung and SK Hynix together constitute nearly 80% of the global market for high-bandwidth memory chips—the ultra-fast memory that feeds AI processors the data they need to train and run models.
- Japan has committed to US$65 billion of public and private investment in physical AI by 2040, with SoftBank and Sony leading the Noetra consortium to develop an AI model for robotics.
- Vietnam plans to train 50,000 chip engineers by 2030 and has secured an Nvidia commitment to build R&D and AI data centres with Vietnamese telecoms giant FTP, while restricting exports of unprocessed rare earth minerals.
- Anthropic is reportedly collaborating with Samsung to develop a new AI chip, signaling how leading US AI firms are locking in partnerships across the Asian chip ecosystem.
Why it matters: The piece frames a structural shift: Asian middle powers are gaining strategic relevance not through AI self-sufficiency but by becoming indispensable in narrow supply-chain segments. South Korea and Taiwan's chip-driven stock surges and subsequent drops already expose the social cost of AI-linked market volatility for those economies.
