Semicon Series 3 | Inside TSMC’s “Baipu Plan” and the Hidden Agenda That Revealed It

The most dramatic tech news this week, of course, came when Jensen Huang（黃仁勳） attended the All-In Podcast’s annual summit and, while speaking onstage with several prominent venture capitalists, unexpectedly received a phone call from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Huang put the call on speaker, allowing Trump to publicly denounce warnings about the threat posed by AI.

The heads of three AI giants—Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI—have all recently called for slowing the development of AI models, sending Nvidia shares sharply lower at one point.

Trump even argued that the opposition was politically motivated and could possibly be coming from China. (Sound familiar? A Chinese Communist conspiracy.…..)

But this heated debate is now spilling into the upcoming U.S. congressional midterm elections. “Restricting AI data centers” has become a central campaign issue, and Democrats opposed to further AI expansion are currently gaining momentum.

Perhaps anxious about that prospect, Trump also stressed during the call that data centers are “the oil of the next 20, 25 years” and could make ordinary people and individual states rich.

Jonah Cheng（程正樺）, chief investment officer of J&J Investment Ltd.（騰旭投資） and better known by his nickname “Captain,” warned while recording a subscriber-only video for this newsletter that the U.S. election could become the turning point for the current AI bull market.

The potential impact on Taiwan’s tech industry could even exceed that of the U.S. presidential election two years ago.

“Whether the market crashes next year could come down to this,” he said.

Back to this issue of the newsletter.

“Where exactly is Baipu（白埔）?” That has been the first question on the minds of many suppliers in TSMC’s CoWoS supply chain after TSMC Co-Chief Operating Officer Y.P. Chin（秦永沛） said the company plans to establish an advanced packaging validation line in northern Kaohsiung.

In fact, like many of TSMC’s sites in southern Taiwan, the location is another piece of state-owned land originally belonging to Taiwan Sugar Corp. The site was formerly Taiwan Sugar’s “Baipu Farm” and will be developed by the Kaohsiung City Government into an industrial park.

Following the model of Nanzih, it is expected to be transferred to the National Science and Technology Council after TSMC moves in, becoming Kaohsiung’s fourth science park.

More importantly, the two facilities TSMC plans to build there will introduce an R&D model never before used in Taiwan: a CoWoS production line that will not manufacture commercial products, but instead invite equipment suppliers to move in and jointly develop and validate products.

Why is TSMC doing this? The answer begins with a meeting at Semicon Taiwan 2026 that was not on the original agenda.