Preface

Taiwan’s Executive Yuan has decided to draft a separate special bill to support drone development and procurement after the Legislative Yuan cut relevant items from the NT$1.25 trillion (approx. US$39 billion) special budget for national defense, with the Executive Yuan citing national security concerns and the need to build an autonomous industrial supply chain. The move comes as a delegation of lawmakers, led by Speaker Daniel K.Y. Han, returns from a visit to TSMC’s Arizona plant and meetings with US lawmakers, yet it remains unclear whether that trip will help win opposition support for the drone bill.

AI-driven hyperscale data center expansion is pushing the global AI race beyond raw GPU computing power into a broader contest over high-speed interconnects and electro-optical integration. As Nvidia’s next-generation AI factory moves toward petabyte (PB)-scale data transfers, co-packaged optics (CPO) is heading toward commercialization, lifting the importance of key components such as fiber array units (FAU) and external laser sources (ELS).