Announced at the start of Computex 2018, the partnership will extend over the next decade to build up local deep learning and associated AI technologies.

“Taiwan was at the center of the PC revolution and now it is investing to play an important role in the next era of computing,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. “With the essential infrastructure and tools, the rich talent in Taiwan’s schools and industry will create world-changing breakthroughs in science and society.”

Taiwan Premier Lai Ching-te expressed enthusiasm for the collaboration, which he called essential to sharpening national competitiveness.

“Taiwan is committed to be an important global player in the AI ecosystem,” Premier Lai said. “NVIDIA is the leader of AI computing in the world. By collaborating with NVIDIA, we will gain the expertise and technical platforms to train AI talents, build the strongest AI ecosystem of both software and hardware, and further reshape the world with our own technologies and services of AI.”

The announcement extends the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology’s “AI Grand Plan,” which was unveiled last year. Last month, MOST unveiled its Taiwania HPC supercomputer powered by NVIDIA technology. And last week, it selected NVIDIA for an AI supercomputer powered by 2,000 NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB Tensor Core GPUs with access to the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) container registry of AI-optimized software.

Speaking last Wednesday to more than 2,200 technologists, developers, researchers and business executives at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference Taiwan, Huang described a series of AI initiatives underway in Taiwan. These address a range of pressing domestic issues in such fields as manufacturing, healthcare and transportation, which align with the government’s focus on furthering AI.