America’s AI Ambitions Depend on Taiwan: Washington Cannot Achieve Tech Dominance on Its Own

Foreign Affairs · Lin Chia-lung · 2026-11-03 05:00 UTC

The United States and China are locked in a global competition to determine who will dominate artificial intelligence and whether it will be democracies or autocracies that set the standards and values of the new digital age. The United States leads the world in the sophistication and power of its artificial intelligence models, and its innovation base and investment in research and development remain unparalleled.

But AI competition is much broader than modeling alone. It encompasses a technology ecosystem that includes power generation, servers, and deployment in real-world applications. Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, has described the AI industry as a five-layer cake with energy at its base and chips, infrastructure, models, and applications above it. To win the AI race with China, the United States needs to maintain or establish an advantage in each of these layers. And to do that, the United States needs Taiwan.

Taiwan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most cutting-edge semiconductors, making it indispensable to the United States’ AI industry. Taiwanese companies also assemble roughly 90 percent of the servers that power the global AI economy. With complementary strengths in manufacturing and design, respectively, Taiwan and the United States have built a mutually reinforcing partnership in AI that has underpinned U.S. leadership in the sector. Alongside democratic countries around the world that don’t want to rely on China for their technology needs, the U.S.-Taiwanese partnership has also made a secure AI supply chain possible.

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