Nvidia CEO denies that US wants to shift 40% of Taiwan's chipmaking capacity to America — Jensen Huang says onshoring is all new capacity, will preserve island nation's silicon shield

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, has rebuffed claims that the U.S. intends to shift 40% of Taiwan's semiconductor capacity to the U.S., therefore removing the island's silicon shield, reports DigiTimes. He insisted that the global fab construction represents new capacity growth rather than relocation. Haung also said that TSMC must expand worldwide to meet surging AI-driven demand for chips and keep Taiwan as its stronghold.

Huang explained that demand for wafers is now outpacing what Taiwan's power grid can physically support, making overseas production a necessity rather than a political manoeuvre. He said that while TSMC will build and expand fabs in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, a substantial share of its output will remain in Taiwan, as no other region can replace the island's manufacturing ecosystem. According to Huang, spreading production across multiple regions strengthens resilience for both Taiwan and the U.S. and prevents supply bottlenecks as AI hardware volumes rise sharply.

For Nvidia, which sells everything it can produce both in Taiwan and the U.S., vast manufacturing capacities are crucial. Meanwhile, getting enough memory — HBM, DDR5, GDDR7, LPDDR5X, or even NAND — is as crucial for the company as getting enough compute silicon. To that end, production capacities for DRAM and NAND in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and eventually the U.S. are just as important to Nvidia as logic production. Huang said the company is coordinating closely with all major HBM suppliers —Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron Technology — to secure the volumes required for its next-generation AI accelerators, namely Rubin.

When it comes to geopolitics, Huang said that lawmakers must balance three competing goals: national security, technological leadership, and economic leadership. Therefore, he dismissed remarks by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who compared exporting advanced AI processors to China to 'selling nuclear weapons to North Korea,' and reminded that the current U.S. government has determined that selling Nvidia's H200 to Chinese entities does not undermine national security. However, he noted that it is now up to the Chinese government to let these processors into the country, as the company is awaiting regulatory clearance from Chinese authorities.

During his Taiwan visit, Huang plans to attend internal Nvidia meetings and Lunar New Year events, as well as to meet TSMC founder Morris Chang and chairman C.C. Wei.

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