I have just published an op-ed in Le Temps, Switzerland’s leading daily, on a Taiwanese paradox: the island that manufactures the world’s most advanced chips still cannot secure its own electricity.

An electric paradox

Taiwan manufactures over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, the ones powering artificial intelligence. Yet it imports 95.4% of its energy, and its electricity grid is connected to no neighbour. TSMC, the world’s leading foundry, already absorbs 9% of the island’s electricity; S&P Global projects it could consume nearly a quarter by 2030.

Connecting, but not to China

Beijing has offered since 2019 to link Kinmen and Matsu to its own grid — an offer revived in April 2026, and refused. Taiwan is instead studying an undersea cable to the Philippines: a permanent physical link with a China that claims the island would mean handing Beijing leverage.

What Ireland and Cameroon show

The op-ed holds Taiwan up against Ireland, which now requires its data centres to bring their own dispatchable generation, and Cameroon, where electricity is abundant yet fails to reach the whole country for lack of adequate grid capacity. Two opposite ways of experiencing the same gap between the authority to decide and the capacity to deliver.

And France?

France has what Taiwan is looking for: abundant, largely decarbonised electricity. An asset that remains underused as long as transport stays heavily dependent on oil.

Read the full op-ed in Le Temps

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Photo: a chip manufacturing plant at TSMC’s visitor pavilion. Hsinchu, Taiwan, June 2025. — © Frédéric Koller / Le Temps.