Nvidia sees ‘very strong’ demand for Blackwell chips — here’s what CEO Jensen Huang said

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Saturday said the chipmaker is experiencing “very strong demand” for its newest, state-of-the-art Blackwell chips, which are designed to power the current Artificial Intelligence boom.

Huang also noted that this increasing demand for Blackwell chips is translating into a growing appetite for wafers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Nvidia’s long-time manufacturing partner.

Speaking at a TSMC event in Hsinchu, Huang acknowledged strong support from the company. “TSMC is doing a very good job supporting us on wafers,” he said, adding that Nvidia’s success would not be possible without TSMC.

Huang made his fourth public trip to Taiwan this year, at a same time when the semiconductor giant is navigating loss of market share in China due to tariff tensions between Washington and Beijing, Reuters reported.

Demand for wafers grow

“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.

TSMC CEO C.C. Wei confirmed that Huang had “asked for wafers,” though the exact quantity remains confidential. Wafers refer to a thin, round disks, that serves as a base for microscopic electronic circuits found in chips.

Nvidia made history in October when it became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market value and TSMC’s Wei celebrated this achievement by calling Huang a “five-trillion-dollar man.”

Supply chain resilience

When questioned about how concerned Huang was about memory shortages, he responded by stating that while business is growing strongly and there would be shortages of “different things,” Nvidia is well-supported.

“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 noted, adding that the chipmaker has received the most advanced chip samples from these 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 announced last week that it had sold out all its chip production for next year, and plans to boost further investments as the company is 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.

Will Blackwell chips be sold in China?

Despite the massive global demand, Nvidia faces limitations regarding the sale of its most advanced AI chips. Huang said on Friday, that there were “no active discussions” about selling the Blackwell chips – Nvidia’s flagship AI chip – to China.

This position is a direct result of the Trump administration’s restrictions on such sales, as the government believes they could aid the Chinese military and the country’s AI industry.

As a response, the Chinese government had also issued an official guidance that mandates new data centre projects receiving state funds to use domestic artificial intelligence chips, Reuters reported earlier.