Nvidia on Friday, unveiled its first Blackwell chip made in the U.S. It was produced at TSMC’s semiconductor manufacturing facility in Phoenix, which also happens to be the Taiwanese giant’s first facility in the country.
The Phoenix factory currently produces chips using TSMC’s four-nanometer process, which is two generations older than the latest two-nanometer node scheduled to enter mass production later this year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the facility to sign the first Blackwell wafer, symbolically marking the start of production for what Nvidia considers the driving force behind the next generation of AI systems.
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Before the wafer can be shipped to customers, it must undergo a series of complex manufacturing stages including layering, patterning, etching, and dicing. However, as noted by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a post on X, the process remains incomplete until the wafer is shipped to Taiwan for TSMC’s CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) advanced packaging. “Only then would production of the Blackwell chip be considered complete,” Kuo explained.
While TSMC has not yet announced plans to establish a CoWoS packaging facility in the U.S., the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Amkor in October 2024. Under this agreement, Amkor will provide TSMC with turnkey advanced packaging and testing services at its upcoming OSAT plant, which is slated to begin operations in 2026.
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“This is a historic moment for several reasons. It’s the very first time in recent American history that the single most important chip is being manufactured here in the United States by the most advanced fab, by TSMC, here in the United States,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. “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.” Ray Chuang, CEO of TSMC Arizona, added: “To go from arriving in Arizona to delivering the first US-made Nvidia Blackwell chip in just a few short years represents the very best of TSMC. This milestone is built on three decades of partnership with Nvidia — pushing the boundaries of technology together — and on the unwavering dedication of our employees and the local partners who helped to make TSMC Arizona possible.”
TSMC had also previously announced that TSMC would be producing AMD’s 6th-generation Epyc processor, codenamed Venice, at its US facility – the first HPC CPU to be taped out on TSMC’s 2nm (N2) process technology. AMD CEO Lisa Su said following this announcement that chips manufactured at TSMC’s Arizona fab would be “more than five percent but less than 20 percent” higher in terms of cost than those produced by the chipmaker at its facilities in Taiwan, but added it was a “very good investment to ensure that we have American manufacturing and resiliency.”