ASE Executive: Trust, Not Tech, Keeps Taiwan Ahead in Chips

As governments from Washington to Riyadh race to build homegrown semiconductor industries, a senior executive at one of Taiwan's largest chip packaging firms argues that factories and funding alone cannot replicate what the island has spent decades quietly building.

Wu Tien, chief operating officer of ASE Technology Holding — the world's leading provider of semiconductor packaging and testing services — told reporters Wednesday following the company's annual shareholders' meeting that Taiwan's most durable competitive advantage is not advanced process nodes or capital spending. It is trust.

"A large part of what makes Taiwan good is the level of trust that overseas customers place in us," Wu said.

Wu described Taiwan's semiconductor supply chain as something closer to a professional alumni network than a conventional industrial cluster. Materials suppliers, equipment makers, wafer foundries, and packaging houses are not merely geographically close — they have worked alongside one another long enough that coordination happens fluidly across every level of an organization.

"From the engineer to the chairman, the level of coordination here simply cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world," he said.

That institutional familiarity becomes especially critical in the AI era, where advanced packaging, high-bandwidth memory, silicon photonics, and high-speed interconnects all require simultaneous development across multiple supply chain tiers. No single company — and no newly assembled industrial park — can replicate that depth overnight.

Wu pushed back against the common framing that semiconductor competition is primarily a race for technical breakthroughs. The decisive battles, he argued, are fought at scale.

"The real competition isn't about making the first chip or the tenth chip," he said. "It's about making the billionth chip and the ten-billionth chip."

Any country can produce a prototype. What separates Taiwan is the accumulated manufacturing expertise — spanning wafer fabrication, advanced packaging, and automated test — that allows the island to ramp production rapidly and reliably when global demand surges. The point, Wu said, is not that only Taiwan can do certain things, but that Taiwan can do them faster and at greater scale when customers need it most.

Some of that speed advantage traces back further than the current AI boom suggests. International customers began sharing roadmaps and co-investing with Taiwanese partners well before markets for those technologies existed.

"Silicon photonics was something customers told us about 17 years ago," Wu said. "CoWoS was something we started on 20 years ago."

That early collaboration was only possible because customers were willing to disclose sensitive product blueprints and long-range technology plans to Taiwanese counterparts — a level of disclosure that reflects something harder to quantify than any manufacturing metric.

The recent announcements by NVIDIA and AMD of expanded investments in Taiwan have drawn considerable attention to the island's role in the global AI supply chain. Wu suggested that observers focusing on investment figures are looking at the symptom rather than the cause.

The more meaningful question, he said, is why the most strategically important technology companies on earth continue to entrust Taiwan with their most critical products and future development plans — not just once, but year after year.

In an industry being reshaped by geopolitical pressure and government subsidies, Wu's assessment carries an uncomfortable implication for those betting that money and policy can compress decades of relationship-building into a few years.

​Original Article in Chinese

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