The US wants more chips made at home, Taiwan wants its crown jewels kept on the island, and Nvidia would like everyone to stop using the word “shift” and focus on capacity rather than mucking around.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has weighed in on the US-Taiwan trade deal, after chatter that Taiwan is being leaned on to move 40 per cent of its chip capacity to American soil.
The backdrop is TSMC becoming a geopolitical bargaining chip, with semiconductors now treated as “national security” kit rather than mere components. Since President Donald Trump took office, pressure on Taiwan to build more in the US has increased sharply.
Reports claim TSMC will bring 40 per cent of its total chip output to US facilities, but Huang insisted it is the wrong way to describe what is happening. When asked about the rumours, he said it is inappropriate to think in terms of “transfer” and that it is really about “increasing” production capacity.
Huang pointed to Taiwan’s power constraints as a hard limit on how far TSMC can expand domestically, which is why it is pursuing fab plans in Europe, Japan, and the US as well.
He spelt out his view that TSMC will need far more capacity than Taiwan can support over the next decade.
“TSMC is going to have to add tremendous amounts of capacity in the next decade. And some of it will be manufactured in the United States, some in Europe, some in Japan, and some here. Much of it will remain here. So my expectation is that the demand for TSMC wafers and capacity will far exceed the amount of energy available in Taiwan.”
Taiwan, for its part, keeps signalling it will not ship the crown jewels offshore. It has insisted that core technology development and production remain on domestic soil, maintaining an “N-2” stance that keeps the most advanced work at home.
That puts a dent in the “resilient supply chain” line, because resilience is not just wafer volume in a new postcode. If cutting-edge R&D and the most advanced nodes remain in Taiwan, the US gets more output, not control of the roadmap.
