Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger praises cutting-edge Nvidia chip production with TSMC on US soil, despite Intel missing out — hails manufacturing milestone of US-based supply chain

Intel's former CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has praised the news that Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs are now being produced at its Arizona facility. It's important, he said, for the most cutting-edge silicon supply chains to be resilient, and that such moves would also help Nvidia develop and iterate faster and bigger into the future.

This comes as somewhat of a surprise, as it was under Gelsinger's leadership that Intel pushed so hard for Nvidia fabrication contracts. To date, Intel Foundry Services hasn't secured any of those contracts, even with the recent Nvidia deal and backing from the US government.

While some Nvidia fans were being duped by a nefarious deepfake scam on Tuesday, others watched Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the GTC DC show make the pitch for just how important Nvidia is to the US, and how much it would hurt US interests if its exports were restricted, as per CNBC. But Nvidia was playing its part too, Huang suggested, highlighting how the latest Blackwell GPUs were now produced within US borders, as well as at TSMC facilities in Taiwan, where the majority of the world's cutting-edge silicon is still manufactured.

Gelsinger was really pleased with this news, though, and took to X to say as such.

Nvidia and many other major tech companies have announced large US-based infrastructure projects over the past year. That's partly down to companies hoping to avoid the mercurial trade tariffs and export restrictions that the Trump administration has levied across a range of industries and countries since coming back to power in January.

As part of a chicken-and-egg metaphor, it's also due to a global shift towards nationalized technology and multi-polar supply chains that don't necessarily rely on China, and vice versa. We've seen the US and China tussle over even seemingly unimportant chip companies, like Nexperia in the Netherlands, as well as argue over rare earth mineral exports.

The specter of China's potential future invasion of Taiwan, where 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors are manufactured, continues to loom over the whole endeavour, too.

Gelsinger was Intel CEO from 2021 to 2024, largely overseeing one of the worst periods in Intel's history. It fell severely behind AMD on the consumer and enterprise CPU front, and the fabrication plant he pushed to build in Germany was ultimately scrapped by his successor - although the Arizona facilities he had Intel build have recently come online.

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