We may have heard that Apple's CPUs, the M family, Bionic are manufactured by a Taiwanese company called TSMC.
But you may not know the AI chips or GPUs used to train the AI of almost all the giants in the world.
Whether it is
- NVIDIA, for example, sold 300,000 units to Meta and Microsoft, and another 200,000 units to Oracle (Amazon, Tencent, and Google also bought 50,000 units each).
- Google's self-designed TPUs for Google Clouds
- Microsoft Azure Maia 100, Cobalt 100 are also produced by TSMC.
- Amazon's recently launched Graviton4 and Trainium2 models are also made by TSMC.
- The D1 chip used in Tesla's Super Computer platform called Dojo is also produced by TSMC.
TSMC Occupies More Than 60% of the Global AI Chip Market Share Almost all the giants design their own chips, but let TSMC produce them.
Why does the U.S. have to discourage China from AI in every way?
Various trade barriers that the United States has made with China, such as banning Huawei or not selling AI chips to Chinese companies, have forced them to turn to Huawei and ZTE services.
It has become an indirect strength for China because Chinese companies that need AI chips have no other choice. It requires a Chinese company to invest heavily in R&D in this area.
Although the technology is still behind the AI chips designed by American giants such as NVIDIA and AMD, there is still a chance to catch up.
I just don't know how much time I don't know.
If China starts a war with Taiwan, the world AI industry will be shaken immediately.
Just by firing a rocket to destroy all the TSMC factories, the supply on this side of the American side has shrunk a lot.
Although there is still production capacity in Europe and Israel that is still dependable, and efforts to set up large factories on American soil.
However, it is still considered a minority, and the scale of the production is full, and some AI chips still need to be ordered in advance.
The second number option is Samsung from Korea from the era of smartphones, but now it has become far behind TSMC (it is the number 2 with a 12% mkt share, 5 times away from TSMC).
If we understand this, we will understand that in addition to Taiwan's bubble tea, which is very important, there is also an important heart box in the field of AI development that is the most important in the world.
Japan is behind giants like America, China, and even Korea.
In this game, Japan has almost disappeared from the world's leading AI technology system. Because there are not enough people who make software and hardware that are the core of AI.
The Japanese government has invested more than 2 trillion yen ($13.2 billion) to join hands with NVIDIA and TSMC to establish a national partnership. Build a chip manufacturing ecosystem there. By bringing in a Japanese company called Rapidus.
NTT, SoftBank, NEC, MUFG Bank, Sony and Toyota are the backers.
The Japanese government knows that if Japan loses the game Competitiveness, including the status of a modern economic power, will decline significantly.
Japan from the past was a leader, became a follower in the semi conductor, chipset, monitor, smart phone, personal computer industry, and is about to compete in the automobile industry for EVs from China.
AI is unacceptable. Japan must unite to fight with all its life.
Korea is another country that has invested all-in capital and resources in AI.
We may know that Korea is one of the leaders in soft power in the world.
However, many people may not know that Korea is also one of the world's leading countries in AI.
Korea is ranked 6th in the Global AI Index and has the 3rd largest number of AI patents in the world.
Only behind the United States and China.
Korean technology companies such as LG, KT, Naver, Kakao, and Samsung are all working together to develop AI potential to compete on a global scale.
Originally, he did it to survive in the world in the future because he knew that in the future, this world is competing and winning and losing.
Using a language model like GPT may not help your country gain much advantage over others because it is good at English, but weak Koreans, Koreans are lacking. A new generation of digital weapons to fight in the next world.
But now, that's not the case anymore because the game they're playing (both at the public policy level and in partnership with the private sector) is to be the world's leader in AI. Although it came after the United States and China, it developed so quickly that it surpassed Japan (of course, Japan refused, as already mentioned).
Korea has made Hyperscale AI from the collaboration of a giant domestic technology company.
We have done AI Infrastructure from Cloud AI, AI Chip & Semiconductor, and we want to push AI Infra to be a world leader.
For example, KT (formerly known as Korean Telecom) is investing in cloud and AI computing systems on a large scale, pushing itself to become an alternative to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
SK Telecom has also recently announced its AI Pyramid Strategy, which aims to compete in AI on a global scale, including investments in cloud, AI semiconductors, and the development of its own LLM or language model called A.X.
In addition, it has invested more than 7.2 billion dollars in AI technology companies in the United States.
One of the benefits is investing more than $100 million in Anthropic, a competitor OpenAI, and jointly developing language models.
It is also preparing to raise the level of TV streaming in the country. AI TV and AI Curation to select programs and programs for people to watch in a personalized way.
AI in Korea is also used in cultural analytics that uses huge amounts of data (movies, dramas, celebrities, images, etc.) + AI and Digital Image Processing to develop content to compete with Hollywood.
Come down to a slightly smaller scale.
Korea has more than 376 AI startups that have raised funds to fight this AI battle with more than 12.5 billion dollars.
In addition to the private sector, the government is also fully committed to AI because it is believed that AI will hit the labor market hard by being replaced by AI.
But at the same time, AI is helping to create more new jobs. In equal numbers.
Therefore, the AI National Policy has been continuously developed since 2019, including policies to promote the private sector, investment from the government, help with R&D, and human skills development.
There is a policy to create a new generation of children to become 1 million digital talents and prepare AI upskilling for the whole nation at all ages.
It can be seen that Korea is very aggressive in the global AI competition.
We will see rapid development in various aspects of Korea, including soft power that uses both AI, Big Data, and Cultural Analytics.
And there is serious preparation for the era of Human Augmented AI.
In Conclusion
- Chip manufacturing companies such as TSMC are chip manufacturers for AI work for the world's largest companies in the field of AI and cloud, including NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Tencent, Oracle, Tesla, and AMD.
- 1 Among the key reasons why the United States must defend Taiwan Because the core of CPUs and AI chips all depend on Taiwan's TSMC.
- The United States invested more than $40 billion for TSMC to set up a new factory in Arizona to reduce risk, and TSMC itself invested more than $500 billion. In order to expand the factory to Europe and other countries such as Japan.
- TSMC has grown because Apple has produced the Bionic and M family of CPU chips, which have become more than 1 billion devices. The TSMC smartphone chipset market now has a share of more than 70%.
- Japan and Korea are Asian countries that are serious about the development of AI by mobilizing the country's giant companies to cooperate with each other.
