Google to expand Taiwan office space by 60% amid AI infrastructure push

Taipei, Sept. 2 (CNA) Google is expanding its Taiwan office space by 60 percent as local partners take on a growing role in developing the company's artificial intelligence infrastructure, a senior executive said Wednesday.

Amin Vahdat, Google's senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said the company expected its operations in Taiwan to continue growing, although he did not provide an investment figure, hiring target or timetable for the expansion.

Speaking at a media Q&A session after delivering an opening keynote speech at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 in Taipei, Vahdat described Taiwan as a critical engineering hub connecting an ecosystem that extends beyond silicon to advanced packaging, liquid cooling and high-power systems.

Much of Google's hardware design and manufacturing takes place in Taiwan in collaboration with local companies, while its engineers work "shoulder to shoulder" with Taiwanese partners, he said.

When the first Google-designed chips come off TSMC's production line, the company's Taiwan team helps bring them up, test them and validate their performance and functionality before they are handed to software developers, according to Vahdat.

"You can't imagine how much anticipation there is for those first few chips that come off the assembly line," he said.

"All that actually starts in Taiwan."

Beyond manufacturing

Vahdat said Taiwan's role in Google's hardware operations extends beyond procurement and manufacturing, with Taiwanese companies already participating in the co-design of its AI systems.

Google is in discussions with multiple Taiwanese partners on future generations of hardware, including rack-level architecture, design for manufacturing and system reliability, he said.

"We couldn't be building the infrastructure, the compute platform that we do today, without this deep co-design," Vahdat said, adding that the cooperation was accelerating "month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year."

Google opened its Changhua data center in 2013 and has invested in several undersea cable projects connecting Taiwan to the world, he said.

Taiwan is also home to Google's largest hardware engineering hub outside the United States, Vahdat said.

The expansion comes as demand for computing power grows by "perhaps 10 times year over year," driven by increasingly capable AI models and services, he said.

Meeting that demand will require a complete redesign of the computing stack rather than incremental improvements to individual components, he said.

Google therefore treats the entire data center as a single computer, jointly designing its buildings, power systems, racks, chips, networking and software to improve overall efficiency, Vahdat said.

Hardware must be designed two to three years in advance and remain useful for five to eight years, requiring Google's infrastructure engineers to anticipate how future AI models will operate, he added.

Power and capacity constraints

Asked which constraint would be most severe over the next 18 months, Vahdat said bottlenecks could shift rapidly among power availability, chip supply, memory, cooling, rack delivery and networking.

"You can't afford to take your eye off any of the constraints," he said, adding that demand for computing capacity was unlike anything he had previously seen.

Energy represents a significant constraint for both Google and Taiwan, Vahdat said.

Google remains committed to achieving round-the-clock carbon-free energy and will continue investing in renewable energy, batteries and geothermal power, he said.

For Taiwan to protect its position in the global technology industry, it should pursue greater manufacturing automation and power efficiency while strengthening cooperation throughout the supply chain, Vahdat said.

"Continuing to deepen our partnerships together from the top of the supply chain to the bottom and everything in between is a wonderful opportunity," he said.