US defence startups flood Taiwan to build China-free drone supply chains

US defence startups are pouring into Taiwan under government facilitation to co-produce drones and uncrewed surface vessels, building a China-free supply chain that can arm both Taipei and US forces operating far from American factories, according to reporting carried by Taiwanese outlets on 14 October 2026.

Central News Agency, quoting The Wall Street Journal, said US firms have signed at least 13 drone and uncrewed-boat cooperation deals with Taiwanese partners since September 2025. Anduril Industries, a supplier to both the Pentagon and Taiwan's military, already holds Taiwan drone contracts worth more than US$1 billion.

Taiwan's August pledge to spend more than US$7 billion on drones over six years is accelerating the scramble. Officials treat a complete domestic drone industry as central to deterring a Chinese attack, especially while a US$14 billion arms package for Taiwan remains unsigned.

The template is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's you-design-we-make model. After the defence ministry said in December 2025 that it needed 1,320 one-way attack surface craft, and the navy sought about US$930 million over six years, Taiwan's largest shipbuilder CSBC Corp reviewed more than ten European and US firms before choosing Rhode Island startup HavocAI, whose software manages autonomous maritime fleets. CSBC chairman Chen Cheng-hung signed the agreement in Rhode Island last month.

HavocAI founder Paul Lwin, a former US Navy pilot, said helping Taiwan field thousands of autonomous boats could defend the island and help prevent a war from starting. Former Pentagon Blue UAS programme official Trent Emeneker said the United States still cannot make every drone part at home, so any supply chain built outside China's industrial ecosystem is valuable — and Taiwanese capacity can fill a real need for Indo-Pacific logistics.

American Institute in Taiwan director Raymond Greene said this summer that US firms were already hunting for research partners on the island to build their own drone supply chains. US Congress late last year directed the Pentagon to establish a joint drone programme with Taiwan.

Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey told a small Taipei media session that his commercial interest runs toward US design with Taiwanese manufacture, or joint design with Taiwanese manufacture, while stressing that Taiwan still needs the ability to design and mass-produce its own weapons. National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology last year signed a co-production deal with Anduril covering Barracuda-500 cruise missiles and underwater vehicles made in Taiwan.

For Taipei the WSJ snapshot is less about another startup photo-op than about whether HavocAI software, CSBC hulls and Anduril production lines can deliver fleets that do not depend on Chinese chips — the same provenance risk exposed this month in the Jiin Ming military-drone parts case.