According to a report in the Commercial Times, NVIDIA has selected Taiwan as the base for its ASIC R&D centre and is currently recruiting staff from major IC design houses locally. This has raised concerns about a potential brain drain from Taiwan’s semiconductor sector.
The reports says that Taiwanese IC firms has seen a wave of talent poaching which has seen major IC design firms like MediaTek, Alchip Technologies, and TSMC’s affiliate GUC facing increased competition for talent.
The move by NVIDIA comes as a growing number of companies are looking for alternatives to NVIDIA’s GPUs. Apple revealed in July 2024, that its AI models supporting Apple Intelligence were pretrained on Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), while at the end of 2024 Apple said that the company was utilising Amazon’s Trainium2 chips, indicating that non-NVIDIA training solutions are proving effective.
As a result, NVIDIA is reportedly establishing its own ASIC department and expanding its custom service capabilities. It is reportedly planning to recruit over a thousand professionals in fields such as chip design, software development, and AI research and development in Taiwan, according to the Commercial Times.
Taiwanese ASIC companies have been playing a critical role in the development of Microsoft’s Cobalt and Maia, Google’s TPU, and AWS’s custom chips, which makes them perfect targets for NVIDIA’s ASIC business.
