Young Liu: AI Is Reshaping Global Supply Chains, and Taiwan Must Shift to “Made with Taiwan”

The artificial intelligence boom is forcing global supply chains to change faster than before, Foxconn Chairman Young Liu said, urging Taiwan to replace “Made in Taiwan” with “Made with Taiwan.”

Liu said the scale of current AI demand is unprecedented. Customers are seeking to reduce supply-chain risk, while geopolitical changes are pushing companies toward more localized production. In his view, Taiwanese industry must combine its core strengths with manufacturing partners and facilities in the markets where products are sold.

From a systems-integration perspective, Liu said the latest AI wave has created extraordinary pressure on the entire supply chain. Companies are expanding to meet explosive demand, but they also face uncertainty over whether those large investments will eventually generate sufficient returns.

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The AI demand in this wave is huge and unprecedented.

He said Foxconn had identified a fundamental shift about a decade ago. Customers were not seeking a complete decoupling, he said, but “de-risking,” with supply chains spread across multiple locations rather than concentrated in one place. Domestic political stability in different countries has also encouraged governments to pursue growth, raise GDP and produce locally the goods consumed by their populations. Geopolitical changes have accelerated that trend rather than reversing it.

Liu argued that overseas expansion serves both customer efforts to diversify risk and governments’ demands for local production. He said Taiwan still offers a combination of distinctive culture, strong education and stable industrial policy, supporting manufacturing that is both high-quality and agile. Taiwan can move quickly at the front of new projects and later transfer portions of production to consumer markets, he said, creating shared growth through international cooperation. The traditional linear process of developing intellectual property, creating products and then taking them to market is no longer fast enough for AI-driven demand, making closer coordination across industries necessary.

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The trend of global supply chains moving toward localization continues to accelerate.