AI arms dealer relies on Taiwanese advanced packaging plants for top-specced GPUs:
US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan.
Nvidia first announced plans to produce chips at Fab21 just six months ago..
Speaking during an event in Phoenix on Friday, Huang lauded TSMC's manufacturing prowess while pandering to US President Donald Trump's America First agenda.
"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," he said.
But while the silicon may be homegrown, Nvidia remains reliant on Taiwanese packaging plants to turn those wafers into its most powerful and highest-demand GPUs.
Modern GPUs are composed of multiple compute and memory dies. The company's Blackwell family of datacenter chips feature two reticle-sized compute dies along with eight stacks of HBM3e memory, all stitched together using TSMC's CoWoS packaging tech.
Up to this point, all of TSMC's packaging facilities have been located in Taiwan. Amkor, an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test services (OSAT) provider, is working on building an advanced packaging plant in the US capable of stitching together silicon dies using TSMC's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) tech. But until it's done – expected in 2027 or 2028 – the next stop for Nvidia's wafers will likely be Taiwan.
During TSMC's Q3 earnings call last week, CEO C.C. Wei confirmed the Amkor plan was moving forward, but the site was only now breaking ground.
It's worth noting that, while Nvidia's most potent accelerators rely on CoWoS, not all of its Blackwell chips do. The RTX Pro 6000, a 96GB workstation and server card aimed at AI inference, data visualization, and digital twins doesn't feature a single GPU die fed by GDDR7 memory rather than HBM3e. This means Nvidia doesn't need CoWoS to produce the chip. The same is true for much of Nvidia's RTX family of gaming cards.
Long-term, Nvidia isn't limited to TSMC or Amkor for packaging either. Nvidia has already announced plans to produce GPU tiles built by TSMC for Intel client processors that will presumably make use of the x86 giant's EMIB and/or Foveros advanced packaging technologies.
Nvidia hasn't said which are the first Blackwell wafers to roll off Fab21's production line. El Reg has reached out for clarification; we'll let you know what we hear back.
(Score: 1) by spiraldancing on Wednesday October 29, @09:10AM (2 children)
Intuitively, "packaging" means wrapping it in a cardboard box, maybe printing some pretty consumer-friendly graphics on it, adding some clear-plastic windows, etc.
But here, they are describing a manufacturing process as "packaging". I've built several PCs myself -- bought a frame, power source, motherboard, and assorted other pieces of hardware and put them together ... and that is definitely not what I would call "packaging". What they're describing here seems even more manufacturing-intensive -- installing and integrating multiple chips into a larger product called (in this case) a GPU ... how is this "packaging"?
Lets go exploring.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday October 29, @10:31AM (1 child)
It's like putting those vaccines in vials is called packaging.
Or like putting beer in bottles and sealing them, that's also packaging.
In this case, they need to take the final product -- the silicon wafers, slice them and connect them to the substrate and the *package*. That's called packaging.
Yes, they are just packaging. But if packaging involves micrometer precision of multiple pieces, it's still packaging. They are packaging different things and you can't compare it to packaging an assembled circuit board in a paper box.
Packaging is what they use to describe their process. I'm not sure we are in position to criticize their use of words here.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday October 29, @04:14PM
Some description here:
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/tsmcs-next-generation-of-system-on-wafer-packaging-will-make-todays-cpus-and-gpus-look-pathetically-feeble-in-comparison/ [pcgamer.com]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday October 29, @11:16AM
It would have been very naive to believe Taiwan would give away all its chips and would bow to the US to boot. Taiwan needs to keep its live insurance intact. They just gave as much as required while still remaining in control. Apparently, contract were not checked deeply enough or maybe the red lines of TSMC were reached.