Taipei: San Jose: Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai promoted Kaohsiung's Smart Lighthouse Project on the sidelines of the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, highlighting its potential for partnerships with international tech firms. Speaking to reporters at Nvidia GTC, Chen said the project was aimed at applying a "sovereign AI" approach to city governance as demand for computing power surges amid a shift toward generative AI inference and "AI factory" development.

According to Focus Taiwan, sovereign AI refers to a country's or region's ability to develop artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and industry networks. Under the initiative, Kaohsiung plans to work with Nvidia and Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) to establish centers using CUDA (compute unified device architecture, created by Nvidia) to support demand for computing power and for software development, Chen said.

The city has met with foreign entities such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ATandT to explore ways to integrate telecom services with Nvidia's vision-language model (VLM) training results to address urban challenges such as traffic, flood prevention and environmental monitoring, Chen said. Kaohsiung also hopes to work with Nvidia to develop what he described as the world's largest city-scale large language model (LLM) with local features.

Also at the conference, Chen spoke with Foxconn Chairman Young Liu during a keynote speech delivered by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and met with representatives from U.S. and Taiwanese companies attending the event. He is also scheduled to meet scholars at Stanford University to expand academic and technological exchanges after completing his visit to Nvidia GTC. The event runs from March 16 to 19 in San Jose. Chen, who departed for the United States on March 11, is scheduled to return to Taiwan on March 20.