Chip manufacturing moving over to the US might seem like a 2025 phenomenon, thanks to the Trump administration's very vocal pushing towards this goal, but TSMC, the world's biggest computer chip manufacturer, approved production of its Arizona plant back in 2020. The US-based fabrication plant (fab) started churning out wafers last year, and it has now produced the first-ever US-made Nvidia Blackwell wafer.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, "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."
And although Huang would, of course, say this about Nvidia's own chip, it is probably true that Blackwell is the "single most important chip." That's because it's far and away the chip that AI datacentre companies are clawing for.
TSMC Arizona CEO Ray Chuang expressed the importance of the recent Blackwell chip: "To go from arriving in Arizona to delivering the first U.S.-made NVIDIA Blackwell chip in just a few short years represents the very best of TSMC."
None of this is to say that the Arizona plant's Blackwell production will pad out supply right now—one wafer doesn't necessarily signal mass production. And we should also remember that this is just a wafer, not a finished chip.
The wafer, made on TSMC's 5 nm process (an Nvidia-specific 4NP node), still needs to be chopped up and packaged, meaning the silicon substrate needs to be encased and affixed to surrounding components, including all those stacks of high bandwidth memory (HBM).
This packaging can't be done in the US right now, so the chips will have to be shipped back to Taiwan for those crucial final touches. In the future, packaging might be done in the US, though. Earlier in the year, Trump and TSMC announced a $100 billion investment plan in the US, and part of that included plans for two advanced packaging facilities in addition to chip fabs.
Of course, we PC gamers are primarily interested in RTX 50-series GPUs, which are also derived from Blackwell architecture. It might be nice to think about possible upcoming RTX 50-series Super cards being made from this plant, but that's unlikely. Scale will be required for the refreshed batch of RTX 50 cards, so those will likely have to come out of Taiwan.
Still, it's promising for the future, especially given the ongoing diplomatic tensions surrounding Taiwan. From a consumer perspective, more chips in more locations is always good, and it's obviously good news from a US standpoint: the world's biggest AI company, an American company, having its latest and greatest chips made in the US.
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