Taiwan makes 95% of the world's AI servers. The rest of the world runs on what Taiwan builds.

Sega Cheng, Co-Founder and Chairman of iKala, argues that Taiwan's hardware leadership is the clearest illustration of how foundational AI infrastructure has become: one country manufactures, assembles, and supplies the chips and servers that power AI for virtually the entire world. From that vantage point, he makes the case that intelligence is becoming the third utility of human civilisation, after water and power. Just as no enterprise or state would accept indefinite dependency on another for electricity, he argues that home-grown AI capability, at the level of data, models, and infrastructure, is no longer a strategic preference. It is a necessity.

That argument is the starting point for a conversation that moves well beyond Taiwan. The tension Sega identifies is sharp: the country building the infrastructure for global AI has yet to fully use it itself, with more than 70% of Taiwanese businesses still to genuinely integrate AI into their operations. Organisations everywhere are making the same structural mistake: layering AI on top of legacy systems and legacy mindsets, then wondering why the returns do not materialise. His answer is not transformation at scale. It is something more disciplined: start where the results are visible. In iKala's experience, that means marketing, where a two-point improvement in targeting or a 20% lift in social media performance gives an organisation concrete evidence of AI's value before committing to deeper and more disruptive change.

The conversation also covers an argument Sega makes with considerable force: what he calls 'consider software soft.' The cost of producing software is approaching zero as AI coding tools advance, which shifts value away from code itself and towards sector-specific application. The organisations that will benefit are those with deep domain knowledge in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and manufacturing, ready to apply rapidly produced software to problems they already understand better than anyone else.

Highlights from this conversation:

• Taiwan assembles over 95% of global AI servers, making it the backbone of the world's AI infrastructure

• 80% of AI adoption effort goes into data collection and cleansing; only 20% touches algorithms or machine learning

• China's AI adoption is state-led and follows a different pattern from the 30/70 split visible in the rest of Asia

• Edge AI is moving from concept to deployment in manufacturing, warehousing, and defence

• iKala's Kolr platform tracks data on over 300 million influencers, providing a concrete case study in AI-layered transformation

Chapters

00:00 AI as the Third Utility

02:32 iKala and AI Adoption

05:10 AI Adoption in Taiwan

08:21 Industry-Specific AI Adoption

09:32 Regional AI Adoption Trends

12:14 Challenges in AI Integration

16:08 Measuring AI ROI

21:16 The Future of Software in AI

24:15 Understanding Edge AI

29:39 Taiwan's Semiconductor Advantage

33:28 Sovereignty in AI and Chip Manufacturing