A Stronger Heart Needs a Bigger Brain

I was sitting in the audience today at Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s “AI Golden Century” policy launch when, halfway through his presentation, the mayor suddenly said: “A while ago, my good friend Dr. Ko Ju-Chun visited Silicon Valley, and he came back and told me there’s a phrase going around over there: Taipei Fever.”

I froze for a second. Then came a wave of genuine emotion, because what I saw on that Silicon Valley trip was real: the whole world is looking at Taiwan, and what they want is not just our chips. It’s Taipei.

The mayor’s “AI Golden Century” declaration is the most forward-looking, most layered, and most historically minded blueprint for Taipei I have heard in years: relocate Songshan Airport, and build the Taipei AI Park on the site.

The policy launch event. Photo: CNA (Central News Agency)

The 300 Hectares We Gain

At the heart of the blueprint is something Taipei simply cannot find anywhere else: one large, contiguous piece of land.

A 300-hectare AI industrial park and more than 150,000 new housing units, with room to imagine self-driving vehicles, drones, and other demonstration technologies woven into daily life. On the northern edge, a 110-hectare park: roughly one London Hyde Park, larger than Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park, four times the size of Taipei’s beloved Daan Forest Park.

Songshan Airport, the “Taipei Flying Field” to older generations, has flown alongside greater Taipei for more than sixty years, and it has completed its historic mission beautifully. Next, the same piece of land will carry Taipei into the virtual world.

A Gift for Neihu, Forty Years Late

There is another gift in this plan that many people missed: Neihu.

Every day, tens of thousands of commuters into Neihu’s tech district squeeze across the same few bridges at rush hour, because the roads cannot get around the airport. There has been no room to build a new bridge or open a new road. Once the airport relocates, arterial roads like Bei’an Road can finally punch through and extend. Neihu traffic sees a real solution at last; to the north, a direct connection to the Beitou-Shilin Technology Park. Taipei’s two great tech clusters, linked for the first time.

On stage, the mayor called it “unblocking the Ren and Du meridians of Taipei traffic,” a reference from traditional Chinese medicine meaning the two master channels of the body. In the audience, I was quietly grinning, because the engineer in me could not help noticing: the initials of Ren and Du are R and D, the two letters every engineer knows best. It gets better. In TCM, the Ren meridian is translated as the Conception Vessel, and the Du meridian as the Governor Vessel. Conception and governance, both unblocked at once. As a metaphor for this policy launch, it could not be more precise.

Why the World Is Choosing Taipei

One more scene from the day stayed with me. Chatting with the mayor, I mentioned that Y Combinator is bringing Startup School to Taipei for the first time on November 12, with CEO Garry Tan leading the delegation and founders from DoorDash, Ollama, and more alongside. The mayor’s eyes lit up: “That’s the accelerator Paul Graham founded.” At that moment I knew: this mayor truly speaks Silicon Valley’s language.

Why is Taipei YC’s first stop? Because Silicon Valley startups are pivoting en masse toward integrated AI hardware and software. As Jensen Huang puts it, the AI agent is the operating system of the next generation, and an operating system needs hardware to run on before it can change the world. Add physical AI and robotics to that picture, and every hardware answer in the world points to Taiwan.

If semiconductors are the heart of Taiwan’s industry, Taipei is the brain — the place where law, finance, capital, software, and talent converge. The problem: the brain has run out of room, and Taiwan cannot afford to stop growing. After NVIDIA chose Taipei for its new headquarters, a long line of international companies wants to follow, and the city urgently needs space.

These 300 hectares are the answer. The mayor put one number on the screen: this plan is projected to drive NT$12 trillion in output, effectively doubling Taipei’s economy. Add New Taipei’s proposed AI industry corridor and AI education programs, plus the AI park plans in Keelung and Yilan, and northern Taiwan can link into a complete Super Intelligence capital corridor.

A Forty-Year Question, Worth Answering Right

What comes next requires the central and city governments working hand in hand. Taiwan’s AI Basic Act has passed; we have the legal foundation, and new possibilities like autonomous transport will keep arriving. In the Legislative Yuan, I will push to bring the central government and the city to the same table. A question debated across party lines for forty years deserves to be answered properly, once and for all.

The Gongguan roundabout we debated for twenty years: opened. The Taipei Dome we debated for thirty years: built. On stage, the mayor reminded us that without the resolve to build the Feitsui Reservoir decades ago, greater Taipei would not have clean water today; without the decision to carve out Daan Forest Park, the city center would have no great lawn. The relocation of Songshan Airport has been discussed for over forty years. Now someone has finally put it on the decision table, with the public’s support, facing the world.

It will not happen tomorrow, but it has already begun in 2026, built on decades of accumulated work by every mayor before. NVIDIA landing in Taipei is the key that opens the AI Golden Century. I hope we turn it together.

Let real AI happen in our Taipei: Taiwan’s semiconductors are going out into the world, and the world’s AI is coming in. On the road to superintelligence, Taipei comes first — arms wide open, let’s seize this golden future together 🙌