The White House celebrated the comments and highlighted recent spending promises made by leading domestic and international tech companies.
Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview published on March 20 that the company will likely spend hundreds of billions of dollars on manufacturing in the United States.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Huang said the Wall Street darling plans on spending “probably half a trillion” on electronics over the next four years.
“I think we can easily see ourselves manufacturing several hundred billion of it here in the U.S.,” Huang said in the interview.
In a March 20 statement, the White House said Huang’s comments to the newspaper were another of the “endless” manufacturing wins that are “part of the manufacturing renaissance under President Donald J. Trump as he solidifies the U.S. as the global leader in artificial intelligence.”
The White House statement points to recent commitments by tech and telecommunications leaders Oracle Corp., SoftBank Group Corp., OpenAI, Apple Inc., and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) to spend hundreds of billions in the United States in coming years.
In his interview, Huang said the decision is motivated by Nvidia’s ability to manufacture chips in the United States through suppliers such as TSMC and Foxconn Industrial Internet Co. Ltd. On March 4, TSMC said it would invest $100 billion in advanced semiconductor manufacturing in Phoenix. That pledge came in addition to an ongoing $65 billion commitment to spend in the Grand Canyon State.
TSMC is a leading chip fabricator, meaning it manufactures semiconductors for companies that design but cannot make them. So-called fabs, also called foundries, play an essential role in the international computer chip supply chain.
Huang did not directly mention tariffs or China. However, Trump’s floating tariffs on semiconductor imports from Taiwan, and the Chinese communist regime’s constant threats on the island, raise questions about reliance on Taiwanese manufacturing.
“At this point, we know that we can manufacture in the U.S.,“ Huang told the Financial Times. ”We have a sufficiently diversified supply chain.”
Huang also mentioned that Nvidia is sensing a growing competitive threat from Chinese company Huawei. He called Huawei “the single most formidable technology company in China” and said U.S. efforts to limit Huawei’s growth have ”done poorly.”
