TSMC, the world’s leading chipmaker, is in talks with U.S. technology giant Nvidia to produce its Blackwell artificial intelligence chips at the contract manufacturer’s new factory in Arizona, sources said.
Three sources told Reuters that TSMC is already preparing to start production early next year.
NVIDIA blackwell waferThe product, launched by the company in March, has so far been manufactured at TSMC’s factory in Taiwan. The company is seeing high demand for the chip from customers involved in generative artificial intelligence and accelerated computing, which it says is 30 times faster at tasks like providing answers to chatbots.
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The agreement, if finalized, would win another customer for TSMC’s Arizona plant, which plans to start high-volume production next year.
TSMC and Nvidia declined to comment. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential.
Apple and Advanced Micro Devices are existing customers of the Arizona plant, two of the sources said. Apple and AMD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
However, although TSMC plans to produce the front-end process of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips in Arizona, these chips still need to be shipped back to Taiwan for packaging.
Two sources said this is because the Arizona plant does not have the necessary substrate-on-wafer-on-wafer (CoWoS) capacity for Blackwell’s wafers.
TSMC’s CoWoS production capacity is currently all located in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, is investing tens of billions of dollars to build three factories in Phoenix, a project that has received approval Huge subsidies from the U.S. governmenthoping to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States.
- Reuters Additional input and editing by Jim Pollard
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