If you’re curious as to the state of demand for AI hardware, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs is pleased to inform you it’s robust.

In a remarkable update Tuesday, Taipei tallied a near 70% YoY surge in export orders for March versus the same month a year ago.

As the figure below shows, the 65.9% increase was the largest since a 72% surge in January of 2010.

Not that this matters, but economists expected a much smaller increase of “just” 45% for last month.

Suffice to say the war in the Mideast and accompanying logistical disturbances had no impact on orders for the island’s bleeding-edge computer equipment.

The regional breakdown showed orders to the US rose more than 76%.

There’s that chart and it’s somethin’ to see, ain’t it? March’s YoY increase was the largest in at least a quarter century.

While I’m not someone who frets ceaselessly over Taiwan (committed as he is to reunification by any means, I think Xi Jinping’s more concerned about the hit China’s hard-won international prestige would take from seizing the island by force than many observers realize), this situation’s suboptimal, to put it mildly.

I’m not saying anything new here, but the concentration of production capacity and know-how for the hardware powering history’s greatest technological epoch on a literal island claimed and coveted by a dictator with unchecked authority to dispatch the world’s second-most powerful military, is a wholly untenable setup.