The celebration in Taipei had the feel of a homecoming. Roughly 1,000 Nvidia employees gathered Wednesday at an event marking the launch of the company’s planned Taiwan headquarters, joined by Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an and by Jensen Huang’s family. The chief executive had a number for the crowd: Nvidia would spend about $150 billion a year in Taiwan.
Huang said the company’s annual spending in Taiwan had climbed from $10 billion to $15 billion four or five years ago to about $100 billion now, and would rise further to $150 billion. He did not specify how many years the commitment would run. “Taiwan is the epicenter of the AI revolution,” he said. “This is where the chips come, where packaging comes, where the systems are made, where AI supercomputers were created.”
The scale is hard to overstate. Nvidia’s most recent quarterly revenue was a record $81.6 billion, with guidance of $91 billion for the current quarter, meaning the proposed annual Taiwan outlay would exceed what the company earns in any single three-month period.
The new campus, called Constellation, will sit in northern Taipei and accommodate 4,000 employees when it opens in 2030, four times Nvidia’s current headcount in Taiwan. Ground-breaking is expected this year. The site puts Nvidia within minutes of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the contract chipmaker that fabricates nearly all of Nvidia’s most advanced silicon, and close to Foxconn, Wistron and Quanta Computer, the assemblers that build its AI servers.
The announcement was the clearest signal yet that the geographic center of the AI hardware industry will remain in East Asia, despite Washington’s push to bring chip manufacturing home. The Trump administration has made turning the U.S. into an AI manufacturing hub a policy priority, backing the effort with tax incentives and trade pressure. Huang’s Taiwan pledge, announced days after those policies were touted, cuts against that narrative.
Ars Technica, which covered the announcement, framed it as a rebuke of U.S. industrial policy: the physical realities of chip supply chains, where capacity, talent and packaging expertise are concentrated in Asia, do not move on policy command. Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and the ecosystem around TSMC, from lithography to substrate materials, took decades to build.
Investors read the news as bullish for Taiwan’s tech complex. The Taiex closed at a record high Wednesday, and Taiwan chip stocks rallied. Mainland Chinese chipmakers, by contrast, saw their shares slide, as the pledge reinforced the gap between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in advanced semiconductor capability.
The money will flow through Taiwan’s industrial ecosystem in specific ways, according to people familiar with Nvidia’s operations: orders to TSMC for advanced wafers, purchases of high-bandwidth memory from suppliers, contracts with the server assemblers clustered in central Taiwan, and salaries for thousands of engineers. Huang said the investment would also bring Nvidia’s newest manufacturing technologies to the island’s factories, part of his push into what he calls physical AI, systems that pair software with robots and machinery.
Huang tied the pledge to a broader prediction. “AI combined with hardware is going to transform manufacturing,” he said at the event, and Taiwan’s partners, from chip plants to electronics factories, would be the first to benefit. Nvidia has been expanding beyond data-center chips into robotics, autonomous vehicles and industrial automation, and Taiwan’s manufacturing base gives it a laboratory for all three.
The pledge also answers a strategic question about Nvidia’s own supply chain. Huang has said the company is diversifying manufacturing to the U.S. and other regions, and Nvidia has announced plans to invest $500 billion in U.S. AI infrastructure with local partners over four years, about $125 billion a year. But the Taiwan spending dwarfs that pace, and analysts said the two commitments are not in competition: the U.S. investment goes to data centers and assembly, while Taiwan remains the source of the chips themselves.
For Washington, the announcement sharpens an uncomfortable choice. The administration has pushed for more domestic chip production, and Nvidia has answered with U.S. assembly plants. But the $500 billion U.S. program, spread over four years, amounts to less than the company now plans to spend in Taiwan each year. Policymakers privately concede the industry’s center of gravity will not shift quickly, people familiar with their thinking said.
Nvidia is expected to surpass Apple this year as TSMC’s largest customer, according to people familiar with the foundry’s planning. That dependence cuts both ways. Taiwan’s dominance is a source of geopolitical risk that executives in Washington have warned about for years, yet every attempt to relocate the industry has collided with the same reality: the expertise cannot be replicated quickly anywhere else.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan and emigrated to the U.S. at age nine, framed the investment in personal terms as well as strategic ones. He has described the island as a second home, and his appearances there carry a political weight that he has handled carefully, praising Taiwan’s engineers while avoiding direct comment on the political tensions that surround the island.
For the AI industry, the message is practical. The machines that train and run the world’s largest models are built around chips made in Taiwan, and Huang’s pledge says that will remain true for the foreseeable future. Companies planning data centers, from hyperscalers to sovereign funds, now have a clearer picture of where the supply will come from, and where the money will keep flowing.
The announcement also reset expectations inside the industry about Nvidia’s relationship with its most important manufacturing partner. By committing $150 billion a year, Nvidia is effectively tying its future to Taiwan’s, and asking the world to accept that the AI revolution runs through a small island in the Pacific. On Wednesday, Huang made that bet explicit, and Taiwan’s markets celebrated.
