TAIPEI (Reuters) -U.S.-based cloud services provider GMI Cloud said on Monday it will build a $500 million artificial intelligence data centre in Taiwan with the support of U.S. chipmaker Nvidia. 

The data centre will come online by March 2026 and will run on Nvidia's ( NVDA ) new Blackwell GB300 chips. The facility will house about 7,000 GPUs across 96 high-density racks, capable of processing nearly 2 million tokens per second. It will draw around 16 megawatts of power.

GMI Cloud Founder and CEO Alex Yeh said Taiwan needs more data centres as "strategic assets" to support its AI development, adding that the island's power-supply challenges can be remedied. He said AI demand has been strong, with the company's GPU utilisation "almost full".

"You want to promote local ecosystems - you have to build the data centre first, you have to build the AI cluster first," he said.

The deal comes as technology giants around the world are pouring billions into AI infrastructure to support rising workloads, creating a windfall for semiconductor companies including Nvidia ( NVDA ), which derives the bulk of its revenue from such sales.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang has previously referred to such clusters as "AI factories" and has in the past year also announced deals to sell its most advanced GPUs to projects in Saudi Arabia and South Korea. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he wants the top AI semiconductors such as Nvidia's ( NVDA ) Blackwell chips reserved for U.S. companies.

Other AI infrastructure projects recently announced in Taiwan include a 100-megawatt AI data centre project announced by Foxconn and Nvidia ( NVDA ) in May.

GMI Cloud, a GPU-as-a-Service provider and one of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) cloud partners, already operates data centres in the United States, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and Japan.

Besides the Taiwan project, GMI Cloud plans to build a new 50-megawatt U.S. data centre, and is looking to seek an initial public offering in two to three years.

The project with Nvidia ( NVDA ) is expected to generate about $1 billion in total contract value once fully operational, Yeh said.

Initial customers for the Taiwan AI factory include Nvidia ( NVDA ) itself, cyber-security firm Trend Micro ( TMICF ), electronics maker Wistron ( WICOF ), Chunghwa System Integration, data-infrastructure provider VAST Data, and industrial solutions firm TECO.

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee; Editing by Brenda Goh and Lincoln Feast.)