TAIPEI, Nov 17 (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 ( NVDA ).

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.)