Nvidia plans to open its Asia headquarters in Taipei's Beitou-Shilin Science Park and launch a major hiring push, CEO Jensen Huang said at COMPUTEX 2025. The move underscores intensifying global competition for skilled tech workers at a time when Taiwan is grappling with a growing shortage of IT talent.
Rock Tsai, chairman of the Information Management Association (IMA), noted that although Taiwan's IT professionals are gaining greater recognition internationally, their worth continues to be consistently undervalued within the country. He pointed out a paradoxical situation where foreign companies view Taiwanese talent as offering high cost-performance, meaning they are both efficient and affordable, highlighting a wider problem of local talent being perceived as undervalued.
Tsai emphasized the importance for Taiwanese companies to adopt a broader outlook as IT employers, focusing on creating improved work environments that enable employees to maximize their skills and increase their overall value.
IMA pushes for IT employer branding through 'IT Matters Awards'
To promote this vision, IMA introduced the island's only IT employer branding program, the "IT Matters Awards," three years ago. The next call for submissions, starting July 1, 2025, seeks to help companies improve their IT environments and attract leading professionals. More than 200 companies and individuals have participated in the previous two editions, with the awards receiving ongoing endorsements from government officials, reflecting broad societal consensus on the importance of strengthening Taiwan's IT talent brand.
New categories highlight AI innovation and open-source contributions
Rock Tsai announced that the third edition of the IT Matters Awards introduces two new categories: the "AI Selected Award," celebrating outstanding AI applications and innovations, and the "Open Source Community Contribution Award," recognizing Taiwan's often unsung contributors to the open source ecosystem. These additions encourage enterprises and individuals to actively engage in AI innovation and open source development, fostering stronger ties between Taiwan and the global technology community.
Learning from France: A blueprint for open source-driven national competitiveness
Tsai pointed to France as a compelling example of how long-term investment in open-source infrastructure can yield national gains in technological competitiveness. Over the course of a year, France rose from 13th to 5th place in the Global AI Index, a leap he attributes to sustained efforts across government agencies, private industry, and grassroots developer communities.
Companies like Hugging Face and Mistral AI—the latter securing a record-breaking seed round just weeks after its founding—have emerged as emblematic of France's open-source-first ethos. Unlike the venture capital-driven innovation model dominant in the US or China's top-down, state-led initiatives, France has cultivated a more deliberate, community-centered approach to technology. This approach, Tsai said, may offer a particularly suitable model for Taiwan.
Taiwan's open source culture: From passive users to active contributors
Tsai noted that while Taiwan has embraced open-source technologies, its role remains largely passive—more consumer than contributor. He urged Taiwanese companies to take the next step, encouraging their engineers not only to use open tools but also to participate in the global communities that build and sustain them.
True open-source participation, he said, involves far more than publishing lines of code. It demands robust documentation, transparent software architecture, and long-term maintenance—elements that reflect a deeper commitment to the collaborative spirit of the open-source movement. Cultivating that ethos, he argued, is essential if Taiwan hopes to strengthen its standing in the global technology landscape.
For Tsai, the stakes are high. He pointed to a growing consensus in the semiconductor industry: software now underpins everything, from TSMC's mantra that "fabs run on code" to Nvidia's market dominance through proprietary platforms like CUDA. Without meaningful investment in software capabilities, he warned, Taiwan risks developing a strategic vulnerability—one that could limit its ambitions in both national development and advanced technology sectors.
Open source, he believes, may offer a rare opportunity for Taiwan to leap ahead—not by following the paths laid by others, but by helping build the next generation of digital infrastructure from the ground up.
Article edited by Jerry Chen
