Nvidia marked a milestone for domestic chipmaking as CEO Jensen Huang celebrated the first Blackwell wafer produced at TSMC’s Fab21 in Arizona. At an event in Phoenix, Huang praised TSMC’s manufacturing and framed the achievement within President Donald Trump’s reindustrialization message, calling semiconductors the most vital manufacturing industry and the most important technology industry in the world. Nvidia first announced plans to produce chips at the site six months ago, signaling growing momentum behind US-based fabrication.
Despite that progress, Nvidia’s most powerful accelerators still depend on advanced packaging capacity located in Taiwan. Modern GPUs are assembled from multiple compute and memory dies, and Blackwell datacenter parts pair two reticle-sized compute dies with eight stacks of HBM3e memory. Those components are integrated using TSMC’s chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, or CoWoS, packaging technology. With TSMC’s packaging facilities currently in Taiwan, US-fabricated wafers will likely be shipped there to become complete products.
There is a plan to localize some of that bottleneck. Amkor, an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test services provider, is building an advanced packaging plant in the United States capable of CoWoS, according to TSMC. On TSMC’s third-quarter earnings call, CEO C. C. Wei said the project is moving forward but is only now breaking ground, with completion expected in 2027 or 2028. Until then, the Arizona-made Blackwell wafers will remain tied to Taiwanese packaging for Nvidia’s highest-end GPUs.
Not every Blackwell-based product requires CoWoS, however. Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000, a 96 GB workstation and server card aimed at Artificial Intelligence inference, data visualization, and digital twins, uses a single GPU die fed by GDDR7 memory rather than HBM3e, which means CoWoS is not needed. Much of Nvidia’s RTX gaming lineup follows a similar pattern, easing reliance on the constrained advanced packaging pipeline for those segments.
Looking ahead, Nvidia is not limited to TSMC or Amkor for advanced packaging. The company has announced plans to produce GPU tiles built by TSMC for Intel client processors, which would presumably leverage Intel’s EMIB and Foveros packaging technologies. Nvidia has not specified which Blackwell wafers were first off Fab21’s line, and the company has been asked for clarification.
