By Faith Hung and Jeanny Kao<\/p>\n
TAIPEI, May 29 (Reuters) – Taiwan’s tech-driven economy is expected to grow at its fastest pace in 16 years \u200cin 2026, the government statistics agency said on Friday, thanks to \u200cbooming demand for artificial intelligence-related technologies.<\/p>\n
Gross domestic product is now expected to be 9.64% higher than \u200ba year earlier, the agency said, the quickest pace since 10.25% was recorded in 2010 and revising up the 7.71% forecast it issued in February.<\/p>\n
The island plays an essential role in the global AI supply chain for companies like Nvidia and \u200cApple, led by the world’s \u2060largest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.<\/p>\n
Strong demand for AI drove Taiwan’s economy in 2025 to expand 8.76%, the agency added, \u2060its fastest pace in 15 years.<\/p>\n
The agency also revised up its first-quarter 2026 economic growth view to 14.55%, marking its fastest quarterly pace in nearly 48 years, versus \u200ba \u200bpreliminary reading of 13.69%.<\/p>\n
“Demand for AI, high-performance \u200bcomputing and cloud infrastructure exceeded expectations,” \u200cit said in a statement. “(Cloud service providers) raised their capex expenditure.”<\/p>\n
The strong economic growth has reinforced the view that Taiwan’s central bank will leave interest rates unchanged through this year, analysts said.<\/p>\n
“There is no inflation pressure … the central bank does not need to use its monetary policy,” said Kevin Wang, an analyst at \u200cMasterlink Investment Advisory. “Raising or cutting interest rates \u200bwill not happen this year.”<\/p>\n
The central bank is \u200bscheduled to hold its next \u200bquarterly rate-setting meeting on June 18.<\/p>\n
The statistics agency expects 2026 \u200cexports to rise 39.77% from a year \u200bearlier, its fastest \u200bgrowth in five decades, compared with a previous forecast of 22.22%.<\/p>\n
It also expects the 2026 consumer price index to be at 1.93%, which would \u200bbe below the central bank’s \u200c2% target but slightly higher than the 1.68% forecast issued previously.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Faith Hung and Jeanny Kao; Additional reporting by Roger Tung; \u200bEditing by Tomasz Janowski and Thomas Derpinghaus)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Faith Hung and Jeanny Kao TAIPEI, May 29 (Reuters) – Taiwan’s tech-driven economy is expected to grow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101,215465,3998,26483],"class_list":["post-674122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-statistics-agency","tag-taiwan","tag-taiwan-semiconductor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}