AeroVironment, the U.S. maker of the Switchblade attack drone that Washington rushed to Ukraine in the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion, will open a Taipei office this month and has put a Taiwanese executive in charge of it.
Celine Fahn, until recently director of government and public affairs at the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan, becomes the company's first general manager for Taiwan. She is also the first Taiwanese national to run the local operation of any of the three American drone makers with a presence on the island.
Fahn told The Storm Media in a recent interview that the office will start with two people, grow to five within two years and reach 10 a year after that, hiring across sales, engineering and external communications.
The headcount is small. What it signals is not. American manufacturers of complete drone systems increasingly treat Taiwan as two things at once: a critical node in the global components supply chain, and a defense market in its own right in the Asia-Pacific.
A 2024 Switchblade Sale Opened The Door
AeroVironment, known in the trade as AV, dates its Taiwan relationship to an American arms sale. In 2024 the U.S. State Department cleared a package of Switchblade 300 loitering munitions for Taiwan worth $60.2 million, a deal the company announced on July 2 of that year.
The Switchblade is a one-way attack drone that loiters over a target area before striking, a category now known as loitering munitions. AV's version arguably created the class, and it earned its reputation in Ukraine, where it was among the first weapons the United States supplied after Russia's full-scale invasion.
Taiwan Turns The Arms Deal Into Industrial Cooperation
In September 2025, during the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition, AV signed a memorandum of understanding with Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, the military's main research and development arm. That agreement is the industrial cooperation component of the Switchblade sale.
Under the memorandum, AV supplies technical expertise, training and sustainment know-how, with the early work centered on its JUMP 20 and JUMP 20-X vertical takeoff aircraft, which are built for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The two sides also agreed to co-develop unmanned systems and autonomy software intended to deepen Taiwan's defense capacity and resilience.
Taiwan has used arms purchases to build up its own defense industry for years. In large international procurements, buyers commonly require foreign suppliers to source locally, invest, co-produce, train workers, co-develop products or transfer technology. The practice is known internationally as offset; Taiwan calls it industrial cooperation.
AV Started As A NASA Contractor In 1971
Speaking at an unmanned systems panel during SEMICON Taiwan earlier this month, Fahn drew a line between her employer and the defense startups it is often lumped in with. Anduril and Shield AI were founded within the past 10 to 15 years. AV was founded in 1971.
It began as a NASA contractor and only later widened its customer base to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army and other military buyers. It remains a Nasdaq-listed company. Among its more unusual credits is Ingenuity, the small helicopter that flew on Mars after arriving with a NASA spacecraft in 2021.
Its products now operate on land, at sea and in the air, Fahn said, and have reached space. Taiwan's connection runs through the Switchblade 300 and 600 series it has bought.
"We are working with Taiwan and with local partners on the Switchblade 300, and we hope to work together on more projects than drones alone. Importantly, we have also developed counter-drone equipment, which matters a great deal in asymmetric warfare today, and particularly in Taiwan, because asymmetric capability and resilience mean a great deal to the defense of an island nation," she said.
Taiwan Supplies More Than $20 Million In Components
Fahn said the U.S. Army has certified AV as a partner, which allows the company to export to partners and allies worldwide, Taiwan included. The Taipei office, she said, is meant to develop products and systems with Taiwan across the board, build an ecosystem around them, and extend that work along the first island chain.
"Over the past three years we have bought a great many critical components from Taiwan, worth more than $20 million, everything from display panels and sensors to batteries and applied materials, and all of it goes into our products and systems. Taiwan is recognized as world-class in product development and world-class in manufacturing, and it is a reliable partner for the United States," she said.
AV does not make international investments casually, Fahn added. It commits only to partners and markets it believes hold enormous potential, and to places that can support its position in the global defense ecosystem.
AV's CEO Links Golden Dome Work To Taiwan
Chief Executive Wahid Nawabi visited Taiwan in June and told Nikkei Asia that one reason for setting up locally was to help Taiwan build T-Dome, the layered air defense network the government has made a centerpiece of its military planning.
President Lai Ching-te first announced T-Dome in his National Day address in October 2025, describing a tightly integrated air defense system built on layered defense, high situational awareness and effective interception. In a December 2025 television interview, Lai said the system would link American-made and domestically produced weapons and use artificial intelligence to detect incoming threats, with the aim of preserving Taiwan's combat power and protecting civilians.
"We are very deeply involved in developing solutions for the United States' Golden Dome air defense system. AV is installing systems in two locations in the U.S., and the technology we have already invested in and developed will be extremely useful for T-Dome," Nawabi told Nikkei Asia.
Read together, those remarks suggest this wave of American defense firms arriving in Taiwan is not only about assembling equipment Taipei has already bought, or buying more Taiwanese parts. It is a bid to write themselves into what Taiwan builds next.
