Have any last-minute beach trips planned this summer? Havoc does, and it’s a long way from its home in Rhode Island.
At a signing ceremony at the autonomy startup’s Providence headquarters yesterday, USV-turned-all-domain-autonomy company Havoc inked a deal with Taiwanese shipbuilding giant CSBC to integrate Havoc’s collaborative autonomy software with CSBC’s unmanned surface vessels in Taiwan.
Under the deal, “CSBC will manufacture the vessels, and we will provide our innovative software,” Havoc CEO Paul Lwin told Tectonic. “It’s open-ended, so with this relationship, any vessels that they design, build, or currently have, we’ll put our software on.”
- That includes the 28-foot-long Endeavor Manta USV, which CSBC publicly unveiled last year, but Lwin said the team will “start small USVs.”
- Havoc’s also no stranger to shipbuilding partnerships: the company has teamed up with Lockheed, Hanwha (to build a 200-foot BFDB, or a big f*ckin’ drone boat), and R&D firm PacMar on a vessel for the US Navy’s MUSV marketplace.
Strait up: The deal is the latest in a flurry of deals between US maritime autonomy companies and their counterparts in Taiwan, which, well, makes a whole lot of sense. If Ukraine is the mecca for American air and ground drone startups, Taiwan is it for the maritime-focused ones.
- In the past few months, Saronic, Vatn, Shield AI, Anduril, and others have all either inked deals with the Taiwanese military’s R&D center (NCSIST) and local defense firms to co-develop maritime autonomy tech—or set up shop there themselves.
Bad neighbors: Take a quick look at a map—especially the roughly paper-thin patch of blue between Taiwan and its very large, not-so-friendly neighbor to the northwest—and you’ll get a sense of why the partners on both sides of the Pacific might be interested in teaming up to fill the Taiwan Strait with robots.
“If the other side can build hundreds of ships quickly, how do you counter it? It’s affordable mass, and in Taiwan, it’s more real than it is for us,” Lwin said. “For us, it’s 8,000 miles of ocean [between the US and China]; for them, it’s a hundred miles of the strait.”
“From the beginning, one of the goals was to prevent war in the Pacific, and we think the way we do that is by affordable mass,” he added. “Thousands of autonomous surface vessels in the Pacific, in the South China Sea, in the [Taiwan] Strait will even the playing field.”
- In a statement, CSBC chairman Chen Jeng-Horng said the deal combining CSBC’s shipbuilding prowess with Havoc’s autonomy tech strengthens “Taiwan’s domestic supply chain and defense industrial base for the long term.”
Arranged marriage: US companies working with Taiwanese counterparts is, yes, largely mission-driven, but it’s also the product of a bit of legislative matchmaking.
Section 1266 of the FY2026 NDAA directs the Pentagon to establish a joint program with Taiwan focused on fielding “uncrewed systems and counter-uncrewed systems capabilities,” including “co-development and co-production.”
- Basically, it’s Congress putting into law that Taiwan should be treated as an industrial partner on these systems, rather than just another customer.
For Havoc and CSBC, “This partnership is designed, honestly, to be a bit of a model for that specific disclosure,” Lwin said, and the benefit of that goes both ways. “We have to make sure that Taiwan is prepared to defend themselves, which will keep the peace in the strait and is obviously important for US national security, but [the US] also has to have manufacturing capacity there.”
“As you think about having to move thousands of boats across 8,000 miles of the Pacific in a conflict, that’s incredibly difficult,” he added. “But if US companies can partner with local manufacturers in the island chain, then…we’ll have the capability to produce thousands of vessels and pair that with innovative software that [can] control, on a scale of thousands, to provide them a way to keep the peace.”
