TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) led a delegation to the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California, taking place this week.
Chen said he attended Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Tuesday, where he learned about AI trends that will influence the development of smart cities. He also met former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Asus Chair Jonney Shih (施崇棠), though the focus of his trip was the GTC conference and not attracting new investment in Kaohsiung, per CNA.
Chen said he was interested in setting up sovereign AI, which refers to a nation's or a municipality's ability to build physical and data AI infrastructure benefitting language learning models, culture, and climate change response. Chen said AI developments could help governance such as transportation management, and even the deployment of emergency services and rescue.
Before attending the keynote address, Chen visited Nvidia's headquarters at the start of the week. He said he had in-depth discussions with Nvidia's senior management about sovereign AI development as he believes Kaohsiung has a large amount of data with Nvidia also showing a high level of interest in how AI can be used for urban development.
For example, Chen said the Kaohsiung Intelligent Lighthouse Project utilized an Nvidia platform to simulate different scenarios for flood disaster prevention and road conditions. Chen said AI use has led Kaohsiung’s emergency preparedness to become more practical.
Chen said that if Kaohsiung's experience is successful, there will be a great opportunity to pilot AI applications in other cities in Taiwan or Southeast and Northeast Asian countries. Chen said AI adoption was an important aspect of smart city governance.
