This month at Taiwan’s biggest computer show, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, was mobbed like he was a rock star, followed by crowds from booth to booth as he signed autographs and posed for selfies.
At the booth of SK Hynix, one of its largest South Korean suppliers, Mr. Huang took a marker and left a message. Atop a reflective memory wafer – a component of Nvidia’s AI supercomputers currently in short supply – he wrote: “Please do more :).”
It was only half a joke. As tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers around the world, demand for the chips, cables and power systems that power artificial intelligence is outpacing supply.
Nvidia has become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world thanks to this spending boom. Now the bonanza lifts the lid on a constellation of lesser-known semiconductor companies — including many from Asia that few Americans have heard of — that make up the essential, unglamorous parts of data centers being built around the world.
“It was a boring industry that no one cared about, but now it has become the most critical infrastructure in the world,” said Timothy Arcuri, a semiconductor analyst at UBS. “They’re laying the railroad tracks, and there’s going to be all this commerce on those tracks for years.”
The gold rush redraws the map of technological power. Chips are the brains of AI systems that process enormous amounts of information. They also need memory technology that retains the information that the systems are thinking about. In recent years, AI models have become so large that holding information has become as valuable as processing it.
The most advanced memory comes, overwhelmingly, from South Korea and Taiwan, and the surge in prices caused by supply limitations is bringing new wealth to the two Asian democracies.
Ten years ago, memory was a cheap commodity, priced in brutal cycles at the whim of big tech companies. This year, prices have more than doubled. At the high end, only three companies are successful: the South Koreans SK Hynix and Samsung and the American Micron, whose most advanced factories are in Taiwan.
None of them are Chinese. Despite years of spending, Beijing has been excluded from much of the supply chain for advanced AI servers. For Washington, it was an accidental triumph: Subsidies intended to take manufacturing out of China produced less than the boom, almost overnight.
Success has a trap. Much of the technology is designed in the United States, but the supply chain still runs through Taiwan and South Korea, neighbors of China and North Korea, where U.S. officials have long feared tensions could flare.
South Korea’s stock market almost doubled in 2026, the best performance among all major markets. Taiwan has set its own records. Samsung and SK Hynix made South Korea the first country, after the United States, to have more than one company surpass $1 trillion in market value simultaneously. Micron has also joined the trillion dollar club.
Evidence of this boom was everywhere at Computex, the Taipei trade show, which is an industry gathering devoted to deeply technical products: plumbing for data centers, voltage converters and memory products with names like HBM4E and SOCAMM2.
This year there was even a bit of dazzle in the air. Surprisingly international crowds gathered around exposed cooling pipes and lingered over bare silicon wafers in glass cases. At the Nvidia booth, a single server rack was running on a pedestal. Spectators stopped to take selfies with the box.
At the SK Hynix booth, where Mr. Huang signed the plaque, an engineer named Vincent Wang said he never saw the rally coming. A veteran of the toughest years — when a memory market crash destroyed Taiwan’s chip industry and nearly forced a government bailout — he didn’t even own shares in his own company.
To Mr. Huang’s call to earn more, Mr. Wang had a counterproposal: “Please pay more.” »
In South Korea, where chip workers at Samsung and SK Hynix receive profit-related bonuses, reports of lavish employee spending have filled the local news. Flea workers have sparked an exotic car buying frenzy. Speculators are chasing flats along the commuter lines that serve the two chipmakers. A matchmaking service has increased its “spouse index” for Samsung employees, ranking them alongside lawyers and doctors.
At Micron, which has spent years buying up parts of Taiwan’s memory industry, good times are also underway. In her hometown of Boise, Idaho, she is building a 43,200-square-foot hangar for her business jets, with offices, a kitchen and a bay marked “executive parking.” It’s part of a multibillion-dollar expansion in the state, one of the largest private investments in Idaho history.
Samsung did not respond to emailed questions. Micron declined to comment. SK Hynix said it was accelerating construction of its chip manufacturing plants and increasing production to meet demand.
Mr. Huang has become the industry’s kingmaker. Last year, Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel, the struggling Silicon Valley chipmaker, and pledged to develop chips with it. Since then, Intel shares have nearly quadrupled.
“Everyone has a smile on their face right now,” said Frank Seifert, an executive at Adata, a Taiwanese memory company. He had followed Mr. Huang’s keynote speech at Computex like thousands of industry fans. When Mr. Huang praised a partner, the chip design company Marvell, and said it would be the next multibillion-dollar company, Mr. Seifert bought the shares. That day it rose by more than 25 percent.
These opportunities are giving rise to a new generation of start-ups in Asia and the United States. A decade ago, venture capitalists didn’t want to touch microchip companies, said Aaron Jacobson, a partner at NEA, a venture capital firm. They required huge investments to prove their technology worked, and their customers were tech giants who demanded low prices. Today the market is bigger and customers are everywhere.
“If you look at what’s happening in the AI data center, there are so many obstacles and things that need to be reinvented,” Mr. Jacobson said.
The moment is a reversal of the last great hardware boom. Twenty years ago, the smartphone made China the world factory. The United States, betting that trade would bind the two countries and keep the peace, was content to let this happen. This gave rise to the manufacturing base that helped make China a rival.
This time, China is visibly absent. U.S. tariffs and technology restrictions have excluded Beijing from much of the AI frenzy.
South Korean and Taiwanese companies that once helped grow this industry in China — through joint ventures, mainland chip factories and lured engineers — are now reaping their own boom. And the boon extends beyond the chips, to the racks, power systems, and cooling system that surround them.
Foxconn and Quanta, which became giants assembling smartphones and laptops, are now building AI servers in Mexico, Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Once-boring companies like Delta Electronics, which made its fortune in power supplies and cooling fans, are growing rapidly thanks to the power converters and liquid cooling that AI data centers demand.
In Taiwan, where boom-bust cycles have bankrupted businesses and shaken the economy, many remain cautious. They were reminded of the risks last week when chip stocks tumbled on concerns that AI’s rally would fall short of Wall Street’s sky-high expectations.
But that didn’t stop the engineers from flocking. Smartphones streaming stock charts have become an increasingly common sight around Taipei – in gyms, doctors’ offices and taxis.
The plaque signed by Mr. Huang will likely end up framed on a wall at SK Hynix’s headquarters in South Korea, Mr. Wang said.
Whether read, in time, as a memory of a historic boom or as a relic of a bubble, it already marks something bigger: the arrival of a nearly China-free supply chain for the world’s most advanced AI, built in two of the most controversial locations on the map.
Joe Rennison contributed reporting from New York.
