NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX SUPER cards made on 11nm, not 12nm?

Now that NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 20 SUPER series graphics cards are on the market, new details have emerged on the TU106 GPU inside of the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER. TechPowerUp noticed that the TU106 GPU has markings on it for 'Korea', which is strange as NVIDIA gets its Turing GPUs fabbed at TSMC which does NOT have a facility in South Korea.

NVIDIA reportedly signed a contract manufacturing order with Samsung back in 2016, which I'm sure is still in play today and now being tested with the new SUPER-infused Turing GPUs. The most interesting part of this news is that Samsung doesn't have a 12nm FinFET process, but instead offers both 14nm and 11LPP. 11LPP is an 11nm nodelet which Samsung uses to compete against the 12nm node from TSMC.

TechPowerUp reached out to NVIDIA, which responded with: "The answer is really simple and these markings are not new. Other Turing GPUs have had these markings in the past. The chip is made at TSMC, but packaged in various locations. This one was done in Korea, hence why his says "Korea". On an unrelated note: We already use both TSMC and Samsung, and qualify each of them for every process node. We can't comment in any further detail on future plans, but both remain terrific partners".

With all of the stuff going on between the US and China right now it makes sense for companies to start looking at other manufacturing plants outside of China control, because if things start to get messy with China then relations with Taiwan will strain. Taiwan is part of the Republic of China, so we might see more companies making strategic moves out of Taiwan and into a safer haven in Korea, backed by Samsung manufacturing. Maybe the companies might start thinking in the way of Where We Go One, We Go All -- out to Korea and possibly the US for manufacturing.