Taiwan is betting on private money instead of government purchases to close its AI computing gap — a market-friendly move, but one that leaves it far behind South Korea and Japan.

• Taiwan's digital ministry launched a build-own-operate scheme meant to add more than 10,000 GPUs' worth of computing power within a year.
• The push follows criticism that Taiwan has only about 30,000 GPUs, against Japan's 40,000 and South Korea's plan to buy 260,000 by 2030.
• Taiwan ranks 16th of 83 governments on the Global AI Index, behind the US, China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan.
• The government is refusing to buy all the computing power itself and hand it to companies free, arguing that would distort the market.
• Power supply is not expected to be a problem, though the ministry will have to coordinate with the economy ministry and the state power company.

Outlook: Taiwan will lean on its chip hardware strength to sell itself as an AI partner to countries looking for alternatives to the US and China.