NVIDIA to send Arizona Blackwell chips back to Taiwan for final assembly

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is currently celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to be produced at TSMC's Arizona facility, and while that is a substantial achievement, the Arizona facility doesn't have all the necessary tools to complete the product, meaning those newly produced chips need to be shipped elsewhere.

If your first guess for the destination of the chips you are correct. Yes, after producing the Blackwell wafer on American soil, as per the plan of US President Donald Trump, it will still need the magic touch of TSMC Taiwan, as the Blackwell wafer will remain in its most rudimentary state until it's shipped back to Taiwan where it will undergo an assembly process that turns the wafer into the usable chips tech companies, and PC gamers around the world are after.

Here's how it works. NVIDIA's Blackwell family of data center chips features two reticle-sized compute dies and eight stacks of HBM3e memory. To connect all these components together, TSMC implements a stitching process that it calls Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate, or CoWoS. Essentially, this process stitches all of the components together to form the Blackwell datacenter chip, and currently, the only facilities capable of carrying out the CoWoS process are located in Taiwan.

"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. This is the vision of President Trump of reindustrialization - to bring back manufacturing to America, to create jobs, of course, but also, this is the single most vital manufacturing industry and the most important technology industry in the world," Huang said at the event

Although company Amkor is currently building a semiconductor packaging plant in the US that will be capable of carrying out TSMC's CoWoS packaging, that facility won't be completed until 2027 or 2028.

While CoWoS packaging is necessary for certain Blackwell chips, it isn't required for all of them, as the RTX Pro 6000, an 86GB workstation and server card designed for AI inference, doesn't require CoWoS packaging.