Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said on Thursday in Taipei that Taiwan should push beyond semiconductors and become a major weapons exporter, arguing that the island’s defense industry should do more than equip its own forces. He said Taiwan ought to be making far more arms than it needs for itself and selling complete weapons systems abroad.
The remarks came during Computex, when Taiwan’s technology sector was already drawing global attention and when the island’s defense planners are trying to harden supply chains for drones and other autonomous systems. Luckey said there are now around 30 Taiwanese companies in Anduril’s supply chains, a sign, in his view, that Taiwan already has a role to play in the next phase of military manufacturing.
Luckey’s pitch was blunt. Taiwan, he said, should look beyond its role as a global supplier of advanced semiconductors and become a major weapons supplier to shore up its own defenses and those of other countries. He said the island could gain a second protective layer alongside the “silicon shield” if it made itself indispensable in defense production as well as chipmaking.
That argument lands at a moment when Taiwan is still trying to close a basic industrial gap. The government has launched a drive to manufacture critical components it currently imports by March 2027, including specialized drone parts such as AI imaging modules and flight control systems and modules. Luckey said Taiwan should scale up its autonomous systems capacity faster and focus on exporting its production rather than stopping at domestic demand.
The friction is clear: Taipei’s current plan is aimed at replacing imported parts, while Luckey is pressing for something bigger — an export industry. He said Taiwan is not ever going to need enough arms purely for itself to support a large weapons market, but that it should still aim to produce 10 times more weapons than it needs locally. In his view, the country does not need to match the PLA Army head-on. It needs highly mobile, relatively inexpensive systems that can stop Chinese forces from crossing the strait, landing in mass, and sustaining an occupation.
Luckey said he developed deep ties to Taiwan during his time with Oculus VR, which Facebook acquired in 2014. For now, the unanswered question is whether Taiwan’s government and industry will treat his proposal as a practical next step or just another outside argument for the island’s defense future.
