In recent years, especially since the emergence of ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been regarded as one of the most important economic and technological revolutions of our time. It has also been of great help to the profit margins and valuation of one company called Nvidia, who found themselves ridiculously lucky when their GPUs became exactly what all the AI companies needed to train their large language models (LLMs), and Nvidia’s revenue has since surged, briefly becoming the most valuable company in the world.

Since 2022, Nvidia stock prices, as well as the stocks and revenue of Taiwanese chip manufacturers who are powering the current AI craze, have soared. This in turn has greatly boosted Taiwanese stocks in general, with Taiwanese shares being the best-performing stock market in all of Asia in the first half of 2024.

Currently, no one knows how long the AI bubble will continue, but one thing is for sure — the Taiwanese tech workers benefitting directly from this AI boom, a tiny percentage of the total Taiwanese population, are having an economic boom and a mini baby boom of their own, in stark contrast to their compatriots in the island nation. However, is this enough to save Taiwan’s fertility rate?

Taiwan's Silicon Valley

When Nvidia’s Taiwanese-born CEO, Jensen Huang, visited Taiwan in June, he received rockstar/superstar treatment across the country. “Jensanity” hit probably the hardest in the city of Hsinchu, where the Hsinchu Science Park is located, where the world’s biggest super-advanced chips manufacturer, TSMC, has its headquarters and main manufacturing facilities.

Jensen Huang himself has stated that Nvidia is planning to invest in Hsinchu, where a cluster of Taiwan’s top semiconductor companies are all situated in close proximity to one another within the Hsinchu Science Park. Known as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, this special region of Taiwan is probably the only place that is currently generating unprecedented profits from AI, because in the actual Silicon Valley in San Francisco, AI giants are still pumping billions in investment but are yet to see sufficient return on investment.

Amidst this boom in AI, the residents of Hsinchu Science Park, the majority of which are employees of these chip manufacturers and other related industries, are enjoying a major jump in their own income and wealth. Hsinchu City and Hsinchu County, the two prefectures where the 150000 workers at the Science Park live and work, both have the highest annual average household income in the whole of Taiwan, beating even the capital Taipei. Guanxin Village, where 90 percent of the residents work at the Hsinchu Science Park, has an average annual household income of US$120,000, making it the wealthiest area in all of Taiwan.

Hsinchu City is also the youngest city in Taiwan, with 15.71 percent of the population under the age of 14, whilst the Taiwanese national average is just 11.9 percent, and together with Hsinchu County (15.36 percent under the age of 14), are the only two prefectures in Taiwan where children aged 0-14 still outnumber the elderly aged 65 and above.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these young, well-off tech employees who are receiving huge bonuses and eye-watering salaries are forming their own families and having children, since the biggest barriers to childbearing in Taiwanese society (i.e. income and housing) are not concerns these tech elites need to worry about.

If we look back to Guanxin village, it is reported that 29 percent of the population are children aged 0-14, nearly triple that of the Taiwanese average of 11.9 percent, and the median age of the area is just 30, compared to the national median age of 45. Moreover, in areas close to the Hsinchu Science Park, schools are reporting a shortage of places for students, with parents fighting for spaces to accommodate their children. This is very rare in Taiwan, where, due to the collapse in fertility rates almost everywhere else on the island, schools are closing and merging en masse.