Peter was part of the crowd that piled into Fuyu Fuyu, a development of high-rise apartments in the northern Taiwan municipality of Taoyuan, one Sunday this month. By day’s end the young engineer, who does not want to be fully identified, had signed up to spend NT$20mn (US$630,000) on a 120 square-metre apartment — his second.

“It is the best way to invest. My income will grow even faster in the next few years, and it is the same for so many others, so the value of the property will go up,” said Peter, who works at Quanta Computer, a contract electronics manufacturer based just a stone’s throw away.

Fuyu Fuyu sounds like a phrase meaning “bestow wealth upon you” — and Quanta is doing exactly that. Long the world’s largest contract laptop maker, Quanta is getting a huge boost from the global AI boom because it also makes high-end servers needed to crunch data for large language models. Its shares and profits have jumped, and employees are reaping the benefits.

Founder and chair Barry Lam has become Taiwan’s richest man, topping the billionaires’ list for the country published by Forbes in April, while lower down company employees such as Peter are sharing NT$3.9bn in cash bonuses paid to staff this year — up 30 per cent from 2023.

Quanta is just one of the companies reinforcing Taiwan’s reputation as a global epicentre for creating tech wealth. UBS last week forecast that Taiwan will have 47 per cent more millionaires by 2028 than today — the largest increase of any country, mainly driven by growth in its semiconductor industry.

Investors, economists and HR professionals say the benefits are spreading beyond the senior managers and engineers at Taiwan’s largest technology companies, who benefited from stock awards in the chip sector’s early days, and reaching a broader swath of society.

“There is a broadening wealth effect, and new groups and younger talent are benefiting,” says Mark Duh, chair of Fuh Hwa Investment Trust, one of the largest domestic fund managers.

The titan of the sector — and one of the main drivers of wealth creation — is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest chipmaker that is now Asia’s most valuable listed company. TSMC reports its latest earnings on Thursday after revealing a 40 per cent jump in second-quarter revenue last week.

But hundreds of other Taiwanese companies that dominate the AI supply chain, from chip design houses and server makers to suppliers of chip testing gear and component manufacturers, are also part of the boom.  

Many senior and mid-level employees at AI supply chain companies received bonuses worth more than two annual salaries last year.

Winway, a supplier of chip testing products, handed out employee bonuses equivalent to 30 monthly salaries last year. Median salaries for non-executive staff at semiconductor design house Global Unichip rose by one-fifth last year, the third straight annual increase, and the company’s total salary spend has been growing by double-digit margins for three straight years, according to statistics published by the Taiwan Stock Exchange this month. At AI server company Chaintech Computer, median pay was up more than a quarter last year.

The AI windfall is just the latest boost to Taiwan’s wealth. During the pandemic, its massive electronics hardware industry benefited from the semiconductor and IT boom triggered by demand for homeworking. The rise of electric vehicles has been another boon for demand.

At the same time, the country’s first generation of postwar entrepreneurs are passing on their riches to their children. Last but not least, many wealthy Taiwanese who previously spent most of their time in China, where they used to concentrate manufacturing investment, have returned home as the investment environment in China has worsened and their companies have come under pressure from customers to de-risk.

Ferrari’s Taiwan sales doubled over the previous four years, highlighting a boom in high-end consumption.

The wealth tide is lifting domestic sectors where incomes have long lagged far behind technology exporters.  

“People pour their rising pay into property. The real estate market is growing a lot and that in turn helps other industries too,” Duh said.

Some building materials and construction companies were among those with the steepest increases in non-executive pay at listed companies last year, according to the TSE figures.

Adding to the AI boost is a growing shortage of workers at all levels as Taiwan’s population has started to shrink. Those bottlenecks have triggered sharp wage rises even in low-end service sector jobs where pay has been stagnating at a low level for many years.

Wages in the hotel and restaurant sector are up 5.5 per cent this year, outpacing the cross-industry average and the largest increase in at least a decade, according to survey figures provided by 104 Job Bank, a local job broker.

According to the TSE figures, mean salaries at listed tourism and hospitality companies rose by 13.6 per cent last year, catapulting the sector to the top rank among more than 30 industries in terms of pay growth from 27th place four years ago. Average salaries in the trade and consumer goods sector grew at the fourth-highest pace among industries last year, up from rank 23 four years ago.

“I believe the main reasons for the rise in salaries in the tourism sector are the post-pandemic travel boom and the labour shortage,” said Lai Wei-wen, a labour economist at the Chung Hwa Institution for Economic Research, a government think-tank.

Still, the wealth effect has limits and swaths of Taiwanese society are not benefiting.

In Taiwan’s January election, young people disaffected over low pay for fresh graduates and the growing gap between top tech industry earners and the domestic service sector abandoned the ruling Democratic Progressive party in droves, leading it to lose its legislative majority.

Money flowing into real estate from high-earning tech workers is also driving up house prices, putting them out of reach for younger workers in other industries even as salaries there rise, too. A residential property now costs the equivalent of almost 10 years of salary on average, according to the ministry of the interior, up from 8.6 years four years ago.

But some officials hope that wealth will spread further. “At least we see some change,” said one cabinet official. “The AI boom is our best hope that it can deepen.”

Mere hours after a cadre of Secret Service agents risked their lives to shield Donald Trump from a would-be assassin’s fire, members of the former president’s security detail were themselves coming under attack.

“There should not be any women in the Secret Service,” rightwing commentator Matt Walsh wrote on X, posting a video showing three female agents ushering Trump into an SUV. “These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.”

Amid the intense scrutiny of the agency’s alleged failings in preventing Saturday’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, misogynist views like Walsh’s have been endorsed by several influential voices on the right. 

X owner Elon Musk posted that he believed the women in the detail were too “small” to cover Trump and had not been selected on merit, while hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman suggested that so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies contributed to the incident.

The backlash was not confined to the loudest voices on social media. Republican congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who achieved a level of notoriety for saying “we are not going to fix it” following a school shooting in his state, told Fox News that Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle was a “DEI initiative person” and suggested that “this is what happens when you don’t put the best players in”.

He and other commentators have referred to Cheatle’s pledge to ensure that 30 per cent of the agency’s staff was female by the end of the decade.

Burchett sits on the Republican-led House oversight committee, which is due to grill Cheatle — who is the second woman to preside over the protection agency and rose through the ranks in a decades-long career — over the Trump assassination attempt at a hearing on Monday.

Advocates for more diversity in national security personnel say they are concerned about the impact of such rhetoric.

“People feel safer in numbers, and so the more people like Tim Burchett say stuff [that is] so obviously misogynist and sexist, the more others who already feel it feel like they’re going to be able to get away with saying it,” said Gina Bennett, who spent 34 years in the CIA and champions the inclusion of women in defence ranks.

“What I think it does is continue to make acceptable sexism, racism, misogyny — because people just get numb to it,” she added.

The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment, but the agency has previously said that all agents were held to the same standards. A spokesperson for Burchett said “the Congressman has said many times, “put the best player in, coach”.

The attacks on the Secret Service’s so-called DEI agenda, which were also endorsed by former attorney-general William Barr and Republican congressman Cory Mills, who is a former army sniper, are the latest front in a long-running war against diversity and inclusion policies being waged by allies of Trump in Congress, the courts and on college campuses.

Over the protestations of the Biden administration, the last National Defense Authorization Act passed into law with a clause that prohibits the government from establishing new DEI positions within the defence department, and from employing anyone whose primary duty it is to craft diversity and inclusion policies, or measure outcomes of such schemes.

While the Secret Service has employed female special agents for more than half a century, its recruitment policies have only recently drawn the ire of Republican politicians.

Earlier this year, the Oversight Committee brought up DEI policies in a letter to Cheatle following an incident involving a Secret Service agent on vice-president Kamala Harris’s protective detail who was later removed from duty after an alleged attack on her superior. 

The matter “raised concerns within the agency about the hiring and screening process for this agent: specifically whether previous incidents in her work history were overlooked during the hiring process . . . as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion effort”, committee chair James Comer wrote.

While the Secret Service has been plagued by past scandals involving male colleagues, such as the alleged procurement of prostitutes in Colombia and drunk driving near the White House, the response to the Trump attack has seen some “seizing [on] specific physical features to indict an entire population”, said Lauren Bean Buitta, founder of Girl Security, which campaigns for diversity in the security establishment.

Bennett, who now teaches at Georgetown’s Centre for Security Studies, said: “Somebody is going to have to point to me the medical anatomical proof that being born with a uterus, somehow or another, makes me less capable of identifying a threat and neutralising a threat.”

Despite the attacks on diversity and inclusion, there had been a “huge rise” in the number of young women interested in national security careers, according to Girl Security. Buitta said it would be “extraordinarily impactful” to have leaders of the respective presidential campaigns condemn the sexist comments, which she warned could “stir up additional hate”.

But the vitriol poured over the women in Donald Trump’s detail may already be having an effect. As he walked on to the floor of the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Monday evening, the former president was flanked by a dozen Secret Service agents — all male.