Taipei, July 26 (CNA) The establishment of an artificial intelligence (AI) computing center by a consortium of Taiwanese companies was announced Friday, aiming to boost the island’s AI capabilities.
The AI Computing Center (AICC) will be the “first in Asia” to use Nvidia’s H200 AI chip, which has 1.43 times the computing power of the H100 chip, and an advanced liquid cooling system provided by AI infrastructure solutions provider Supermicro, ENLight Corp. Chairman Lin Yi-shan said at a press conference in Taipei.
Lin said the AICC will officially begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2024 with 64 servers, which will be located at Chief Telecom’s smart internet data center in Taipei.
“But ultimately the total number of servers will be 256,” he added, noting that the total computing power will be 93 petaFLOPS (floating-point operations per second, a measure of a computer’s computing power), putting it around 15th in the world in terms of supercomputer power.
Lin did not say when all 256 servers would be operational.
Lin emphasized that the center’s goal is to “help Taiwan expand its strengths from the hardware sector to the field of AI applications, and realize the vision of an ‘AI Taiwan’ where national strength is defined by computing power.”
He also announced that the company will lead the establishment of the center together with Supermicro, in collaboration with other strategic partners including data center operator Chief Telecom, AI infrastructure management provider Infinitix, electronics company Inventec Besta and cloud technology startup VMFive.
“The computing center will support the big data analysis, deep learning and complex computing simulations required for next-generation development in various industrial sectors, from finance, marketing, entertainment, healthcare and even government,” Lin said.
The center also plans to donate some of its computing power for public applications, including use by government agencies, schools and research institutions, he said.
Meanwhile, at the press conference, a memorandum of cooperation was signed between the AICC and the Kaohsiung City Government.
Cheng Cheng-ho, a KMT councillor for Hsinchu city, where many tech companies are based, also attended the event and called for cooperation between his city and the AICC.
(Allison Shao)
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