Nvidia CEO reaffirms Taiwan's critical role in AI chip supply chain

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is the pride of Taiwan and the nation's position in the global semiconductor supply chain remains unwavering, Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang said during his visit to TSMC's annual sports day event at Hsinchu County Stadium. Huang arrived in Tainan on Friday afternoon and visited TSMC's 3-nanometer fab at the Southern Taiwan Science Park. In his remarks at the event, Huang reflected on TSMC and Nvidia's history, saying that 30 years ago "TSMC and Nvidia were two small companies," and praised the company saying "You [TSMC] are the pride of Taiwan. You are also the pride of the world" and "Nvidia is not possible without you. We have built two incredible companies."

In response to media queries about whether the US-China competition in artificial intelligence would affect Taiwan's position in the industry, Huang stated that "AI would influence every country, every company and everyone," describing AI as "the most important technology of all time" and emphasizing that "Taiwan plays a pivotal role in the development of AI, as it is a global semiconductor powerhouse." He added that Nvidia is receiving "very strong demand" for its state-of-the-art Blackwell chips, noting that "Nvidia builds the GPU [graphics processing units], but we also build the CPU [central processing units], the networking, the switches ... so there are a lot of chips associated with Blackwell." TSMC chairman C.C. Wei confirmed that Huang had "asked for wafers," though the amount of the order was confidential, and Huang stated he saw Nvidia's "Rubin" chips on the production line and that "TSMC is doing a very good job supporting us on wafers."

When asked about competitors' chip development efforts, Huang distinguished Nvidia's offerings from Google LLC's Tensor processing unit and Amazon.com Inc's application-specific integrated circuits. He explained that "Nvidia's GPU can be applied to many scientific fields such as quantum computing, biology and physics, and process massive amounts of data," adding that "It is more accommodating, as it can be used in almost every cloud and every data center." Regarding memory supply concerns, Huang said "We have three very, very good memory makers — SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron — which are all incredibly good memory makers, and they have scaled up tremendous capacity to support us," noting that Nvidia had received the most advanced chip samples from all three. SK Hynix last week announced it had sold out all its chip production for next year and planned to sharply boost investments, expecting an extended chip "super cycle" spurred by the AI boom, while Samsung said it was in "close discussion" to supply its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM4, to Nvidia.

On Friday, Huang stated there were "no active discussions" about selling Blackwell chips to China, as the administration of US President Donald Trump has embargoed such sales, citing concerns that they could aid the Chinese military and China's AI industry.