US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan.

Nvidia first announced plans to produce chips at Fab21 just six months ago..

Speaking during an event in Phoenix on Friday, Huang lauded TSMC's manufacturing prowess while pandering to US President Donald Trump's America First agenda.

"This is the vision of President Trump of reindustrialization — to bring back manufacturing to America, to create jobs, of course, but also this is the single most vital manufacturing industry and the most important technology industry in the world," he said.

But while the silicon may be homegrown, Nvidia remains reliant on Taiwanese packaging plants to turn those wafers into its most powerful and highest-demand GPUs.

Modern GPUs are composed of multiple compute and memory dies. The company's Blackwell family of datacenter chips feature two reticle-sized compute dies along with eight stacks of HBM3e memory, all stitched together using TSMC's CoWoS packaging tech.

Up to this point, all of TSMC's packaging facilities have been located in Taiwan. Amkor, an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test services (OSAT) provider, is working on building an advanced packaging plant in the US capable of stitching together silicon dies using TSMC's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) tech. But until it's done – expected in 2027 or 2028 – the next stop for Nvidia's wafers will likely be Taiwan.

During TSMC's Q3 earnings call last week, CEO C.C. Wei confirmed the Amkor plan was moving forward, but the site was only now breaking ground.

It's worth noting that, while Nvidia's most potent accelerators rely on CoWoS, not all of its Blackwell chips do. The RTX Pro 6000, a 96GB workstation and server card aimed at AI inference, data visualization, and digital twins doesn't feature a single GPU die fed by GDDR7 memory rather than HBM3e. This means Nvidia doesn't need CoWoS to produce the chip. The same is true for much of Nvidia's RTX family of gaming cards.

Long-term, Nvidia isn't limited to TSMC or Amkor for packaging either. Nvidia has already announced plans to produce GPU tiles built by TSMC for Intel client processors that will presumably make use of the x86 giant's EMIB and/or Foveros advanced packaging technologies.

Nvidia hasn't said which are the first Blackwell wafers to roll off Fab21's production line. El Reg has reached out for clarification; we'll let you know what we hear back.

By: DocMemory
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