Nvidia has begun producing its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips at a TSMC plant in the United States. Until now, Nvidia's Blackwell had been manufactured at TSMC's production base in Taiwan.
On Oct. 17 (local time), Nvidia said mass production of Blackwell had begun at TSMC's Arizona fab (factory).
Huang Jen-hsun, Nvidia chief executive officer (CEO), visited the plant that day and signed the first Blackwell wafer produced in the United States with TSMC's vice president of operations. At a ceremony held at TSMC's Arizona fab that day, CEO Huang said, "For the most important single chip to be made at the most advanced TSMC fab in the United States is a first." He added, "This is the realization of President Trump's vision for industrial restructuring."
Blackwell is a semiconductor optimized for training and inference of large language models (LLMs), with significantly improved compute efficiency over the earlier Hopper. The TSMC process Nvidia uses to produce Blackwell chips is known as N4P, an improvement over the 5-nanometer (nm, one-billionth of a meter) class N5.
Nvidia said, "TSMC's Arizona fab will produce high-performance semiconductors using advanced processes at 4 nanometers and below going forward." Nvidia said this production "will strengthen the U.S. domestic supply chain and, by onshoring the AI technology stack that converts data into intelligence, help secure U.S. leadership in the AI era."
TSMC received $6.6 billion in subsidies during the Joe Biden administration, invested $65 billion, and began construction of the Arizona plant, with production starting late last year.