Dive Brief:
- Nvidia plans to build semiconductor manufacturing plants in the U.S., the chipmaker announced Monday. As part of the onshoring move, the chipmaker will pour up to half a trillion dollars into domestic AI infrastructure in partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Foxconn, Wistron, Amkor and Siliconware Precision Industries.
- The company provisioned more than one million square feet of industrial space to manufacture and test its Blackwell graphics processing unit chips in Arizona and build AI processors in Texas, according to the announcement. Production will ramp up over the next 12 to 15 months, Nvidia said.
- “The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement. “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency.”
Dive Brief:
Nvidia initiated the domestic manufacturing push amid widespread economic concern and uncertainty triggered by a sweeping tariffs regime announced April 2 and placed on temporary pause one week later by President Donald Trump.
Levies on goods manufactured outside of the U.S. have threatened to drive up hardware component prices, cutting into enterprise IT spending plans and putting tech leaders in a bind.
“Companies don’t know what the tariffs are going to look like,” said Gordon Wong, senior partner and operations excellence practice lead at West Monroe. “All they know is things are going to be more expensive, and they’ll have to cut costs to mitigate the impact.”
As a key player in AI chip design and production, Nvidia has been subject to trade restrictions since the Department of Commerce implemented export controls on advanced computing and semiconductor manufacturing items to the People’s Republic of China under President Joe Biden in 2022.
Semiconductor import controls are now on the table as the Commerce Department embarks on a Section 232 investigation that could trigger levies on chips and components manufactured outside of the U.S.
Demand for AI compute ignited a data center spending spree that drove massive Nvidia revenue gains and catapulted the company to the top of the global semiconductor market last year, according to a Gartner analysis published last week. Nvidia overtook Samsung to control nearly 12% of the global chips market, which grew 21% year over year to $655.9 billion in 2024, the firm said.
“Nvida moved to the No. 1 spot as a result of a marked increase in demand for its discrete graphic processing units that served as the primary choice for AI workloads in data centers,” Gartner VP Analyst Gaurav Gupta said in the report.
