PHOENIX — Phoenix marked a major milestone in domestic semiconductor manufacturing on Friday, according to officials with NVIDIA and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).

The companies gathered at TSMC’s Phoenix fabrication facility to celebrate the completion of the first U.S.-made Blackwell wafer.

The event also underscored a deepening partnership between NVIDIA and TSMC, which they say will help position the U.S. as a global leader in AI through advanced chip manufacturing.

“This is the single most vital manufacturing industry and the most important technology industry in the world,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at the event.

What’s so special about the Blackwell wafers being made in the U.S.?

The NVIDIA Blackwell superchips are made at TSMC’s factory complex in Phoenix, and Amkor and SPIL will partner with NVIDIA to package and test them.

They’re powerful enough to power the next wave of AI infrastructure and data centers, company leaders said.

“Blackwell is an incredible chip and it goes into a computer that weighs two tons, and so 144 Blackwell chips go into a computer — and that’s an AI super computer and that weighs two tons — and each one of those systems has 1.3 million parts in it,” Huang said. “And the entire supply chain necessary to build all of that is being brought to the United States.”

Huang added that NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are the world’s leading AI processors, and the systems built around them are the first AI supercomputers designed specifically for reasoning.

To support this technological advancement, NVIDIA plans to produce half a trillion dollars in AI infrastructure across the U.S. over the next four years, partnering with TSMC, Foxconn, Wistron, Amkor, SPIL and other major tech firms that manufacture components for AI and supercomputers.

“Just to be able to support the AI infrastructure build out that we’re going to do, we’re going to need all of the fabs that are being built here in Arizona,” Huang said. “Behind the scenes, the amount of technology necessary to make these systems work is just utterly mind blowing.”

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