Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says a forgotten 1950s European alliance secretly secured Taiwan’s chip empire — decades later, an island hardly bigger than Maryland dominates 90% of the advanced chip market

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says a forgotten 1950s European alliance secretly secured Taiwan’s chip empire — decades later, an island hardly bigger than Maryland dominates 90% of the advanced chip market

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says that dominance began with a largely forgotten 1950s partnership between Taiwanese economic planner Li Kwoh-ting and Dutch electronics firm Philips. That early foreign collaboration helped introduce industrial knowledge and production skills that laid the foundation for Taiwan’s modern electronics sector. Decades later, the island is home to TSMC, the leading manufacturer of advanced semiconductors, while Dutch company ASML supplies the critical lithography machines used in production. Taiwan’s rise also accelerated when IBM published its personal computer specifications, letting Taiwanese firms build compatible chipsets and motherboards for a booming global market. Today that concentration of cutting-edge manufacturing matters directly to consumers because it shapes the supply and cost of phones, laptops, cars and artificial intelligence hardware. Governments and companies are now hunting for reliable alternatives, but replicating Taiwan’s specialised workforce and infrastructure quickly remains extremely difficult.