The Ministry of Digital Affairs has secured a NT$10 billion (US$304.53 million) budget to invest in innovative services related to artificial intelligence (AI), it said yesterday, adding that it would seek to expand resources by working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), angel investors and venture capital firms.
Minister of Digital Affairs Huang Yen-nun (黃彥男) made the announcement at the AWS Summit Taipei yesterday morning.
Taiwan was ranked ninth out of 64 nations in terms of digital competitiveness last year, Huang said, citing an assessment by the International Institute for Management Development.
Photo: CNA
That ranking was achieved through a collective effort, he said.
President William Lai (賴清德) has vowed to develop AI innovation and make the technology a driving force for economic growth, he added.
“We have secured NT$10 billion from the National Development Fund to invest in AI-focused innovations. We would also work with AWS, angel investors and venture capitalists to ensure that more guidance or resources could be directed toward developing AI-related applications,” Huang said.
AWS managing director for Taiwan and Hong Kong Robert Wang (王定愷) said that the company has more than 1,400 partners in its ecosystem and has trained more than 100,000 workers in Taiwan in the past 11 years.
The company previously announced that one of its regional cloud data centers would be launched in Taiwan next year.
“We are already the largest public cloud provider in Taiwan. Once we have servers installed here, many of our customers would want to use them to conduct proof-of-concept testing,” Wang said. “We hope that the facility would generate economic value for Taiwan and allow more advanced technologies to be tested here.”
About 90 percent of international video game companies listed on stock markets are AWS clients, he said.
“The video game industry has facilitated the development of virtual reality, augmented reality and other technologies. We hope that the government imposes fewer restrictions on the industry, as many companies have the potential to be listed on the US stock exchange,” he said.
Huang also commented on last week’s global outage of Windows systems caused by a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
“The software update was not a cyberattack in and of itself, but it should not have happened in the first place,” he said. “A cyberattack might affect only a small number of companies, but the software update this time led to global consequences, which was unprecedented. We need to learn a lesson from it.”
Huang questioned why CrowdStrike pushed a comprehensive software update during the day.
“Normally, a software update should proceed in the hours around midnight, and a backup system would be activated if there are problems during the update process. Updates of main and backup systems should proceed at separate times,” he said.
Although the outage disrupted operations of airlines around the world, including Taiwanese carriers, Huang said that it did not significantly affect computer systems in central and local governments.
“In the future, when government services become available through the public cloud, we would make sure they all have backup systems,” he said.
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