Four Asian Powers Carve Up the AI Supply Chain
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- Taiwan sits at what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the "epicenter" of the AI revolution because TSMC dominates production of the world's most advanced semiconductors; Taiwan's foreign minister has declared that leading-edge chipmaking capabilities must remain on the island, even as TSMC's overseas plants in Germany, Japan, and the US produce only trailing-edge chips.
- South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix are investing nearly $600 billion (£446 billion) in two new chip plants and together control roughly 80% of the global market for high-bandwidth memory chips — the ultra-fast memory that continuously feeds AI processors with data.
- Japan has set a public-private investment target of $65 billion in physical AI by 2040 — roughly one-tenth the Korean figure — and SoftBank and Sony are leading a consortium called Noetra to build an AI model for robotics to address the country's demographic challenges.
- Vietnam is training 50,000 chip engineers by 2030, has secured Nvidia's commitment to build R&D and AI data centers with telecoms firm FTP, and is restricting raw rare earth exports to push beyond assembly toward full chip manufacturing.
- Anthropic is reported to be collaborating with Samsung to develop a new AI chip, drawing a US frontier-AI lab into Korea's chip ecosystem alongside Nvidia's courtship of SK Hynix, LG, and Naver on Jensen Huang's July Asia tour.
- The article's central argument: AI competitiveness is not about self-sufficiency but about cultivating indispensability — though the source notes that stock-market surges from Korean and Taiwanese chipmakers have already fueled domestic consternation over wealth inequality and volatility.
Why it matters: Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung/SK Hynix control irreplaceable links — leading-edge fabrication and roughly 80% of high-bandwidth memory — giving mid-sized economies outsized strategic leverage over both US tech giants and Chinese competitors, though the source notes the resulting stock-market surges have already sparked domestic concerns over wealth inequality and volatility in the 'winning' economies.
