Taipei, Taiwan – November 20, 2025 – Google announced the opening of its largest artificial intelligence infrastructure hardware engineering center outside the United States on Thursday. Located in Taipei, the new multidisciplinary facility will house hundreds of engineers focused on designing, testing, and accelerating hardware innovations that power Google’s global AI development.
The opening ceremony was attended by Taiwanese President William Lai Ching-te, who highlighted the significance of the investment. “The opening of this new R&D center in Taiwan highlights our growing role in global AI development, and we will keep leveraging our strengths to help build secure and trustworthy AI,” President Lai wrote on X.
According to Google, technology developed and validated in the Taipei center will be deployed across its worldwide network of data centers, directly supporting services such as Google Search, YouTube, Cloud platforms, and the latest Gemini AI models. The company emphasized that Taiwan offers a unique environment that seamlessly connects chip design, engineering, manufacturing, and deployment—an ecosystem few locations in the world can match.
“This builds on Google’s existing presence in Taiwan, which is a unique setting that connects the critical elements for building AI infrastructure, from design and engineering to manufacturing and deployment,” the company stated.
Google has maintained a strong foothold in Taiwan for over a decade. Its first Asia-Pacific data center opened in Changhua County in 2013, and the company has steadily expanded its engineering teams since establishing an infrastructure hardware group in 2020. Additional hardware labs were inaugurated in New Taipei City’s Banqiao District in 2021 and 2024, setting the stage for Thursday’s flagship facility.
The new center will play a central role in advancing Google’s custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the specialized chips that dramatically accelerate machine-learning workloads. Engineers in Taipei will handle everything from integrating TPUs onto server motherboards to assembling and stress-testing full rack systems, ensuring they perform reliably at global scale. These innovations will flow directly into Google’s data centers on multiple continents, powering the billions of daily queries and interactions across its products.
The facility itself reflects both modern engineering and local influence, incorporating energy-efficient cooling designs and collaborative workspaces. Google has committed to achieving carbon-neutral data center operations by 2030, and the Taipei hub aligns with that goal through sustainable building practices.
Economically, the center arrives at an opportune moment for Taiwan. The island’s technology sector already accounts for more than 15% of GDP, driven largely by semiconductor manufacturing. With hundreds of high-skilled jobs being created and new university partnerships in the works, the investment is expected to further strengthen Taiwan’s position as a global innovation hub.
Geopolitically, the launch carries symbolic weight. Amid ongoing U.S.–China technology competition, Google’s deepened commitment to Taiwan underscores the island’s critical role in democratic supply chains for advanced computing. The presence of senior officials from both Taiwan and the American Institute in Taiwan at the ceremony reinforced the strategic partnership between the U.S. and Taiwan in next-generation technology.
President Lai concluded his remarks by noting that the center “allows the world to see that Taiwan is not only a vital part of the global technological supply chain, but also a key hub for building secure and trustworthy AI.”
With demand for AI infrastructure projected to surge in the coming years, Google’s expanded Taipei operations position the company—and Taiwan—at the forefront of the next wave of artificial intelligence advancement.
