NVIDIA, an artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor company, has begun producing its latest AI chip, Blackwell, in the United States.
On October 17 (local time), NVIDIA announced that mass production of Blackwell had started at TSMC's Arizona fab (factory).
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, visited the factory that day and signed the first Blackwell wafer produced in the United States together with TSMC's Vice President of Operations. During the commemorative event held at TSMC's Arizona fab, CEO Huang stated, "For the first time ever, the most important single chip is being manufactured at an advanced TSMC fab in the United States," adding, "This is the realization of President Donald Trump's vision for industrial transformation."
Blackwell is a chip optimized for large language model (LLM) training and inference, significantly improving computational efficiency compared to its predecessor, Hopper. The TSMC process used by NVIDIA for Blackwell chip production is known as 'N4P,' an enhanced version of the 5nm-class 'N5' (1nm = one billionth of a meter). NVIDIA explained, "TSMC's Arizona fab will produce high-performance semiconductors using advanced processes of 4nm or below in the future."
With this development, the United States is further strengthening its domestic semiconductor supply chain. The U.S. attracted TSMC's factory by offering substantial subsidies. TSMC began construction of the Arizona plant with an investment of 65 billion dollars and 6.6 billion dollars in subsidies during the administration of former President Joe Biden. NVIDIA stated that this production "will strengthen the domestic supply chain, localize the AI technology stack that turns data into intelligence, and help secure U.S. leadership in the AI era."
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