Taiwan has strategic advantage in AI-driven robotics era: Jensen Huang

Taipei, Sept. 6 (CNA) Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said "everything Nvidia makes begins in Taiwan" and with its manufacturing base, the country has a strategic advantage in a world with AI-driven robotics, as he was named one of this year's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) laureates.

Huang was named one of this year's ITRI laureates in a ceremony held on Friday in Hsinchu. In a pre-recorded acceptance speech, he said that Taiwan is the home of Nvidia's cherished partners and "everything Nvidia makes begins in Taiwan."

He recounted Nvidia's "long history" and deep friendship with Taiwan, starting with his first trip to the country in 1995, when he visited Morris Chang (張忠謀) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which "changed the trajectory of Nvidia."

"With SPIL and Amkor, we built the modern supply chain ecosystem. With our first graphics partners ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and Palit, we created the modern PC gaming market that thrives today," he said. "With Quanta, Foxconn, Inventec, and Wistron, we invented AI supercomputers and the modern data center."

Now Nvidia is in partnership with Taiwan industry to "invent the future of robotic factories," which Huang said is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity for Taiwan."

He said that two fundamental changes are happening in the computer industry. One is accelerated computing that could help drive down cost and energy consumption when general purpose computing reaches its limits.

The other is generative AI, which is "reinventing every layer of the computing stack" and "opening new frontiers in what software can do from language understanding, self-driving cars, protein design, extreme weather prediction, to robotics," the Nvidia CEO said.

Generative AI is opening new markets for computing and enabling automation for a 100 trillion dollars of global industries, and the chip and computer industries, in which Taiwan plays a big role, "are on a path to be an order of magnitude larger than today," he said.

While the first wave of AI was "frontier model makers and consumer Internet services," the new wave of enterprise AI has come where companies are the users of AI to accelerate productivity and create new products and services, Huang said.

AI-driven robotics that understands the physical world will be the next wave, he noted.

"Robotics is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Taiwan" as it is one of the world's leading manufacturing centers which can become AI-driven to build everything from chips to electric cars, Huang said.

"In the next wave of AI, Taiwan's large manufacturing footprint is a strategic advantage, and with robotics it can scale beyond the island's relatively small population," he added.

He noted that ITRI's formative role in Taiwan's chip and computer industries, saying that he envisions ITRI playing a central role again in advancing AI and robotics research and adoption in Taiwan.

The other four of five newly minted laureates are AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su, GlobalWafers CEO Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭), Acer CEO Jason Chen (陳俊聖), and Chen Shih-ann (陳適安), superintendent of Taichung Veterans General Hospital.

According to ITRI, the honor is bestowed upon individuals whose remarkable contributions have significantly propelled industrial technology development.