TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan is the foundation of global AI infrastructure and should not be treated as a negotiable asset in US-China diplomacy, according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Alexander Benard and David Feith published Wednesday.
The authors said Taiwan is often incorrectly viewed as just another issue in the broader US-China agenda, alongside tariffs, rare earths, and regional security concerns. This framing misses Taiwan’s growing importance to the AI era, they wrote.
Taiwan is no longer only a geopolitical symbol or a test of US credibility. Instead, it has become a core production hub for AI hardware, anchoring the infrastructure behind advanced computing systems.
The authors said AI does not exist purely in software or the cloud, but depends on a complex industrial base including chipmaking, advanced packaging, and memory integration. This supply chain has a geographic center, and Taiwan is its most important node, they wrote.
At the center of that ecosystem is TSMC, which produces roughly 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. However, the authors said focusing only on chip fabrication understates Taiwan’s importance in the broader AI hardware stack.
AI systems also depend heavily on advanced packaging technologies, high-bandwidth memory integration, substrate manufacturing, and testing. Technologies such as CoWoS are described as essential for combining logic chips and memory into systems capable of training frontier AI models.
According to Benard and Feith, this means the debate over onshoring semiconductor production is often misleading. While new fabs in the US, including in Arizona, are important, they do not yet replicate the full ecosystem required for AI system production.
Chips manufactured in the US still often require shipment back to Taiwan for advanced packaging and integration before they can be used in high-end AI systems. The authors also pointed to expansion efforts by firms such as Amkor Technology but argued that such projects remain limited in scale and years away from matching Taiwan’s packaging capacity.
Taiwan’s advantage is not just individual firms but a dense industrial cluster that brings together foundries, packaging houses, materials suppliers, and testing specialists, they said. This proximity allows faster innovation cycles and higher manufacturing efficiency.
The authors argued that replicating this ecosystem elsewhere would take decades and require far more than building fabs alone, including full-scale packaging and supply chain integration across multiple industries.
They concluded that Taiwan’s position is indispensable to US AI leadership and argued that any attempt to win the global AI race must account for Taipei’s importance.
