NVIDIA and TSMC celebrate first US-made Blackwell wafer – with a “but”

NVIDIA and TSMC celebrated together last Friday, the 17th, the manufacturing of the first Blackwell wafer made in the United States. The Component was produced at TSMC’s Fab 21, in Arizona, and marks an achievement for complex chips once again being manufactured in the North American territory.

There is, obviously, great symbolic and political significance in the production of these chips. This is something that did not go unnoticed in the speech by Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, who made a point of praising the current US government in his speech:

“This is the very first time in recent American history that the most important chip of all is being manufactured here in the United States by the most advanced factory, by TSMC, here in the United States”, declared the executive, highlighting the name of the country twice in a row.

“That’s President Trump’s vision for reindustrialization — to bring manufacturing back to America, to create jobs, of course. Plus, it’s the most vital manufacturing industry and the most important technology industry in the world.”

NVIDIA chips still can’t be made entirely in the US

Certainly NVIDIA and TSMC celebrate one of the most important milestones in the current US policy of reindustrialization in electronics, but today’s most complex chips cannot yet be completely finalized in the country.

The Blackwell-based wafer made at Fab 21 itself will need to be shipped to Taiwan so it can become a finished product, like a B300 GPU. This is because the CoWoS-L packaging process for such advanced components cannot yet be done in the USA.

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