Trade war elephant in the showroom at Computex Taipei, Asia’s biggest tech expo
As Trump threatens to reinstate high tariffs on Taiwan, tech-sector exporters reliant on the US market fear the worst
There was an elephant in the showroom at this year’s Computex Taipei tech expo.
Loud speakers boomed the guttural sounds of action games loud enough to be heard across dozens of booths, where blazing white lights glinted off the thin black edges of new microprocessors on display. Some of the show’s 86,521 prospective buyers tried out AI-enabled laptops with 3D displays – visible without special glasses – screening a country lane in Japan one moment, a complicated colon surgery the next.
But the scene differed little from Computex 2024, held 18 months after OpenAI’s game-changing release of ChatGPT.
By June last year, that window had given developers enough time to release foundational hardware, such as AI computing chips and accelerators for cloud servers – a boost to Taiwan’s economic growth, including an unexpectedly fast 5.37 per cent year-on-year uptick in the first quarter of 2025.
But in the grand scheme of things, that was just a bug. Now, the elephant.