Kevin Huang | The Week Taiwan's Supply Chain Became the Story (Computex 2024, Taipei)

For most of my life, Taiwan's role in the technology industry was something Taiwanese people understood and the rest of the world did not think about. In June 2024 that stopped being true, and you could watch it stop.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) came to Taipei for Computex 2024, and on the eve of the show he hosted a dinner for the people who actually build what Nvidia designs — among them TSMC, MediaTek and Quanta. The photographs that came out of that room went everywhere: the chief executive of the most valuable chip company in the world, at a table in Taipei, drinking with the chairmen of the firms that fabricate, package and assemble his products. Taiwanese media have since made the annual dinner a fixture of Computex week.

What made the image land was not celebrity. It was recognition of something structural. An AI accelerator is a design until somebody can manufacture it at volume, cool it, power it and build it into a rack, and the companies capable of doing all of that sit within about an hour of each other on this island. The dinner made a supply chain visible as a set of relationships between named people, which is what it has always actually been.

I am a Taiwanese engineer. I build and run Metablox.co on my own — infrastructure, backend, everything — which is about as far from a fab as software gets. But watching that week from here, I understood the thing I had grown up next to slightly differently. This is not a place that happens to host manufacturing. It is a place whose accumulated engineering practice is genuinely difficult to reproduce anywhere else, and 2024 was the year the rest of the world said so out loud.

Computex 2024 ran at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center; the supplier dinner was held separately at a restaurant in the city.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co