The first US-made Nvidia Blackwell wafer has been manufactured at TSMC’s fab in Phoenix, Arizona.

In a statement announcing the news, Nvidia said the production of the wafer signals that Blackwell has reached volume production.

Before emerging as Blackwell chips can be shipped to customers, the wafer will first need to undergo layering, patterning, etching, and dicing processes.

However, as analyst Ming-Chi Kuo noted in a post on social media platform X, while the wafer might have been produced in the US, it still needs to be shipped to Taiwan for TSMC’s CoWos (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) advanced packaging, as “only then would production of the Blackwell chip be considered complete.”

TSMC has not announced plans to open a CoWoS facility in the US, but the company did sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Amkor in October 2024, which will see Amkor provide the chipmaker with turnkey advanced packaging and test services at its forthcoming OSAT plant, slated to begin production in 2026.

“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,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. “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.”

Ray Chuang, CEO of TSMC Arizona, added: “To go from arriving in Arizona to delivering the first US-made Nvidia Blackwell chip in just a few short years represents the very best of TSMC. This milestone is built on three decades of partnership with Nvidia — pushing the boundaries of technology together — and on the unwavering dedication of our employees and the local partners who helped to make TSMC Arizona possible.”

In addition to manufacturing Nvidia Blackwell chips at its Arizona fab, in April, it was announced that TSMC would be producing AMD’s 6th-generation Epyc processor, codenamed Venice, at its US facility – the first HPC CPU to be taped out on TSMC’s 2nm (N2) process technology.

Following that announcement, AMD CEO Lisa Su said that chips manufactured at TSMC’s Arizona fab would be “more than five percent but less than 20 percent” higher in terms of cost than those produced by the chipmaker at its facilities in Taiwan, but added it was a “very good investment to ensure that we have American manufacturing and resiliency.”