Jensen Huang personally visited Taiwan Semiconductor, stating "We need capacity," and claimed "Without TSMC, there is no NVIDIA."

Faced with the sustained strong demand brought about by the AI boom, the world's most valuable company, NVIDIA, is making every effort to ensure its chip supply. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, personally visited Taiwan to seek more capacity from key partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), highlighting the core position of this Taiwanese chip manufacturer in the current AI supply chain.

According to Bloomberg, on November 8, Huang appeared at TSMC's annual sports meeting in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and told reporters that NVIDIA's business is "very strong and getting stronger month by month." He revealed that during this visit, he requested TSMC to provide more chip supplies.

TSMC's CEO, C.C. Wei, also confirmed on the same day that Huang indeed requested an increase in wafer supply. Wei told employees that TSMC expects to continue achieving record annual sales growth. This series of interactions occurred after a recent pullback in large tech stocks, where the market's enthusiasm for AI was temporarily affected by concerns over OpenAI's funding issues and well-known investor Michael Burry's bearish bets against NVIDIA.

Huang's public call for more capacity and his high-profile affirmation of the partnership not only conveyed extreme confidence in the demand outlook for AI but also intuitively revealed that NVIDIA's growth is closely tied to TSMC's capacity. Huang stated at Saturday's event, "Without TSMC, there would be no NVIDIA today."

Capacity Bottlenecks Highlighted, Strengthening Supply Chain Becomes Key

Behind the strong demand lies a severe challenge on the supply side. Reports indicate that one of Huang's main purposes for visiting Taiwan was to secure more wafers for NVIDIA's Blackwell series chips. Currently, there is huge market demand for NVIDIA products, including the Blackwell series chips and rack-level configurations, and capacity has become the key bottleneck in meeting this demand.

TSMC's advanced manufacturing capabilities are particularly scarce globally. Wei had previously told analysts in October that the company's capacity remains "very tight" and that it is working hard to narrow the gap between supply and demand. In this context, NVIDIA is actively striving to become one of TSMC's major customers for the 3-nanometer process, expected to account for about 30% of total output.

At the same time, NVIDIA's competitors, including Qualcomm, are also working to challenge its leadership in the AI accelerator field and are similarly vying for TSMC's limited advanced capacity. This makes Huang's efforts to solidify the relationship with TSMC particularly important and urgent.

"Without TSMC, There Would Be No NVIDIA" - Strategic Dependence

Huang's statement that "without TSMC, there would be no NVIDIA" is not an exaggerated courtesy. A deep analysis of its supply chain reveals that TSMC is at the center of NVIDIA's AI business, both in core semiconductor manufacturing and in advanced CoWoS packaging services.

This conclusion also reflects the evolution of NVIDIA's strategy. In the past, NVIDIA was seen as a "late adopter" of cutting-edge chip technology, but now the company is actively competing for the most advanced chip technologies like A16, which means its dependence on TSMC will only deepen further This year, this is Jensen Huang's fourth visit to Taiwan. His frequent meetings and high praise for TSMC executives indicate that the relationship between the two sides is continuing to deepen. In the fierce competition of AI, keeping TSMC, such an "industry's most sought-after company," closer to itself has become a core strategy for NVIDIA to maintain its market dominance.