Alliance sets out vision for new 'AI Taiwan' advanced computing center

Taipei, July 26 (CNA) The establishment of an artificial intelligence (AI) computing center by an alliance of Taiwanese enterprises was announced on Friday, with the aim of advancing Taiwan's AI capabilities.

The AI Computing Center (AICC) will be "the first in Asia" to use Nvidia's H200 AI chips that have 1.43 times the computing power of H100 chips, as well as advanced liquid-cooling systems provided by AI infrastructure solution provider Supermicro, said ENLight Corp. Chairman Joe Lin (林以山) at a press conference in Taipei.

AICC's operations will officially start in the fourth quarter of 2024 with 64 servers, and will be located in Chief Telecom's smart Internet Data Center in Taipei, Lin said.

"But eventually there will be a total of 256 servers," with computing power totaling 93 PFLOPS (or petaFLOPS, floating-point operations per second, a measure of computer performance in computing), placing it around 15th place in the world's ranking of supercomputers' computing power, he added.

Lin did not say when all of the 256 servers would be up and running.

The purpose of the center is to "help Taiwan to advance its strength from the hardware field to AI application field, realizing the vision of 'AI Taiwan' where state power is defined by computing power," Lin stressed.

The chairman also announced that his company is leading the setup of the center together with Supermicro, in conjunction with other strategic partners including data center operator Chief Telecom, AI infrastructure management provider Infinitix, electronics company Inventec Besta and cloud technology startup VMFive.

"The computing center will support big data analysis, deep learning or complex computing simulation that are needed by next-generation development of various industry sectors ranging from finance, marketing, entertainment, medicine, and also the government," Lin said.

The center will also donate a portion of its computing power for public applications, including use by government agencies, schools and research institutions, he said.

Meanwhile, a cooperation memorandum between the AICC and the Kaohsiung City government was signed during the press conference.

KMT Legislator Cheng Cheng-chien (鄭正鈐) of Hsinchu City, where many tech corporations are located, also attended the event and called for cooperation between the city and the AICC.