This text is taken from Courrier de l’ économique. Click here to subscribe.
If artificial intelligence (AI) is a rather abstract technology, let’s not forget that it rests on an enormous hardware base: servers and very tangible computing devices. To fully understand where AI is going, we can do worse than learning where it comes from. And a large part of it comes from the companies present at the 2024 edition of Computex, which is taking place in Taipei these days.
A global AI show taking place in Taiwan in spring 2024 is interesting for several excellent reasons. The first is geopolitical. China does not like the nationalist government recently elected by this small island country of 23 million people that it considers its own, but which democratically elects a government that has been independent of China since 1949.
Taiwan also has a modern economy, powered by the manufacturing of electronic components. Half of the semiconductors produced on the planet come from this 36,000 square kilometer island.
Unsurprisingly, the largest semiconductor manufacturer is Taiwanese: TSMC (literally the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). Samsung and Intel follow, but far behind in terms of production volume. In all, three of the five largest chipmakers are based in Taiwan.
More and more fleas
In this era where states are massively adopting technology for many reasons (including surveillance of their population, in states like China, in fact), having Taiwan on your side is therefore an important asset. So, while Beijing sends its navy to conduct a few exercises in the surrounding waters, American multinationals come to Computex to extol the merits of a chip manufacturing strategy spread across several continents…
Because there are more and more fleas. We find them everywhere: in PCs, telephones, toothbrushes… They also drive the wave of artificial intelligence which waters everything in its path. These chips are increasingly sophisticated, and include several components that give life to what will soon be the personal digital assistant that everyone dreams of: the one capable of finding the proverbial needle in a 1500-page PDF document, to make your workday even more productive.
This is actually the main, if not the only, trend at Computex this year: AI. It takes many forms, of course. But it is omnipresent. The challenge is to convince businesses and consumers that they cannot do without it, which remains to be proven. In any case, Computex is a place where we talk more about quantity than quality: number of chips produced per day (Intel dreams of 1 million by 2026), number of operations per second (we are in the 20 to 40 billion), etc.
All this to inflate another figure, that of personal computer sales. It will be difficult in 2024, now that everyone has equipped themselves with new equipment for teleworking…
We must add to the reasons to go there that since the beginning of the 2000s, Computex has been at the top of the short list of events to visit at least once in a while for any techno journalist who doesn’t want to miss anything. industry trends. There is of course the CES, in Las Vegas, which covers all consumer electronics (and which also tries to collect its share of the pie from the world of young companies), then the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, which brings together almost everything that is done on the move. Add to that the IFA in Berlin, an autumn event focused on innovation that has also existed for ages…
Incidentally, visiting Taiwan when coming from Montreal is also an opportunity to test Air Canada’s relatively new connection between Montreal and Tokyo. And even if the Internet connection on board the Boeing 777-300ER which tirelessly makes this round trip was faulty, we can only conclude that digital technology really follows us everywhere these days. Even at 37,000 feet in the air.
Transportation and accommodation costs for this report were paid by Intel, without any control over its content.
This text is taken from Courrier de l’ économique.