Nvidia CEO Huang sees strong demand for Blackwell chips

By Wen-Yee Lee

HSINCHU, Taiwan (Reuters) -Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Saturday said the semiconductor giant is experiencing "very strong demand" for its state-of-the-art Blackwell chips, as its appetite for wafers from TSMC grows.

"Nvidia builds the GPU (graphics processing units), but we also build the CPU (central processing units), the networking, the switches, and so there are a lot of chips associated with Blackwell," Huang told reporters at an event held by Nvidia's longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co in Hsinchu.

TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said that Huang had “asked for wafers,” but that the number was confidential.

“TSMC is doing a very good job supporting us on wafers,” Huang said during his fourth public trip to Taiwan this year, adding that Nvidia's success would not be possible without TSMC.

Nvidia made history in October when it became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market value and TSMC's Wei called Huang a “five-trillion-dollar man."

When asked how concerned he was about memory shortages, Huang said that business was growing strongly and there would be shortages of “different things.”

"We have three very, very good memory makers - SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron - are all incredibly good memory makers, and they have scaled up tremendous capacity to support us," Huang said.

Huang also said Nvidia has received the most advanced chip samples from all three memory makers.

When asked about possible memory price increases, he said: "it's for them to decide how to run their business."

South Korea's SK Hynix said last week it had sold out all its chip production for next year and planned to sharply boost investments, expecting an extended chip "super cycle" spurred by the AI boom.

Samsung Electronics also said last week it was in "close discussion" to supply its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM4, to Nvidia.

On Friday, Huang said there were "no active discussions" about selling Blackwell chips - Nvidia's flagship artificial-intelligence chip - to China. The Trump administration has prevented such sales, saying they could aid the Chinese military and the country's AI industry.    

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee in Hsinchu; Editing by William Mallard and Thomas Derpinghaus)