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The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) Arizona facility has manufactured its first batch of chips for tech firms Apple, NVIDIA and AMD suggests a report in the Taiwanese press. The Arizona plant kicked off production late last year, and it initially aims to produce semiconductors using N4 process technology. The report adds that the first batch of NVIDIA's latest Blackwell AI GPUs, which rely on a custom N4 variant dubbed 4NP, has been sent to Taiwan for packaging after the first batch of Arizona chips led TSMC to produce 20,000 wafers for its top customers.
AMD's 5th Generation EPYC Data Center Processors To Also Be Manufactured In Arizona, Says Report
While TSMC's Arizona manufacturing plant can produce high-end chips up to the N4 process, they still need to be shipped to Taiwan for packaging. Packaging is a key part of the AI chip supply chain, assembling the sliced silicon AI chip dies into integrated circuits that can be used in a printed circuit board and, eventually, an AI data center.
TSMC has partnered up with US firm Amkor to develop advanced packaging capabilities in the US, but its initial batch of chips will be transported to Taiwan to be packaged into ICs. Packaging capacity has been the key bottleneck in AI supply, and today's report suggests that TSMC can expand its capacity to 115,000 units this year from 75,000 last year. The capacity bump is for the CoWoS L/S packaging, and earlier reports have suggested that packaging capacity could sit at 75,000 by mid-2025.
As for the chip production in Arizona, the report claims that TSMC has produced 20,000 wafers as part of its first batch of chips from the site. These include products for NVIDIA, AMD and Apple, with the three firms having announced orders for the site soon after it became official. According to the details, the wafers include those for NVIDIA's Blackwell AI chips, which will be shipped to Taiwan for advanced packaging using CoWoS technology.
Along with NVIDIA's AI chips, the Arizona site has also produced Apple's processors used in the iPhone lineup and AMD's fifth-generation EPYC data center processors. The high demand generated by AI packaging has forced firms such as TSMC to expand capacity. It has also incentivized other players to enter the market.
These include Taiwan's UMC, which is the second-largest contract chip manufacturer on the island. UMC is reportedly working with Qualcomm to package chips using its wafer-on-wafer (WoW) technology.
While the TSMC Arizona site is currently producing N4 or 4-nanometer chips, it aims to expand capacity to 3-nanometer and 2-nanometer manufacturing processes in the future by building additional fabrication plants. TSMC also aims to eventually package chips in the US to remove the need to ship them to Taiwan for packaging.
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