Since NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced plans to establish an overseas headquarters in Taiwan, many Koreans have been reflecting on their country's shortcomings and believe South Korea is lagging in the AI race. However, today the mood has shifted to celebration among Koreans, as OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, announced that Seoul will become Asia’s third hub, following Tokyo and Singapore. This raises important questions for Taiwan about why it wasn't selected.

OpenAI stated that the choice to set up in South Korea aims to promote local AI applications and support local businesses and policymakers. Notably, South Korea is also the country with the second-most paid ChatGPT subscribers outside the United States.

If Taiwan wants to build a complete AI ecosystem, it needs more than just hardware. Manufacturing is merely the base of the industrial value chain; consumer applications hold the greatest added value. While Huang is prepared to bolster Taiwan's AI infrastructure, the question remains: is Taiwan ready to effectively leverage these powerful AI hardware resources?