The chip designer Nvidia has said it will build up to $500bn (£378bn) worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years, in a sign of manufacturers investing in operations on American soil amid Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The announcement comes after Trump reiterated threats on Sunday to impose imminent tariffs on the semiconductors that Nvidia makes mostly in Taiwan, and after the chipmaker’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, dined at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this month.
Nvidia, whose chips have helped drive the huge wave of artificial intelligence (AI) development in recent years, will work with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories so it can create “supercomputers” completely within the US.
Nvidia designs its chips but outsources its production to contractors such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). In its last financial year, Nvidia reported that its cost of revenue, which consists primarily of support for manufacturing, testing and producing chips, stood at $16.6bn.
Production of its popular Blackwell graphics processing unit has already started at TSMC’s plant in Phoenix, Arizona, Nvidia said. Construction of new plants is also under way with the manufacturers Foxconn in Houston and Wistron in Dallas. Mass production at both plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12 to 15 months.
Huang said that adding American manufacturing helped the company “better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers”, strengthened its supply chain and boosted its resiliency. The White House said in a statement that Nvidia’s decision was “the Trump Effect in action”.
Nvidia’s stock market valuation has ballooned in recent years thanks to huge demand for its AI chips, with the shares rising by more than 1,000% since 2020. However, tariff uncertainty has wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off its market value since the start of this year, with the share price sinking by about 20%.
Global stock markets have opened this week tentatively higher on hopes that Trump could ease some of his new levies. On Tuesday, Japan’s Nikkei rose by 0.8% and South Korea’s Kospi by 0.9%. However, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng slipped by 0.16% and Chinese markets were also lower, down 0.1% in Shanghai. In Europe, markets also gradually continued their recovery, with the UK’s FTSE 100 index up 40 points, or 0.5%, to 8,175 in early trading, while Germany’s Dax gained 0.7% and France’s Cac was up 0.1%.
Trump is still pressing ahead with plans to impose tariffs on semiconductor and pharmaceutical imports. On Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce initiated an investigation into the impact of imports of chips and pharmaceuticals on American national security.
So far, pharmaceuticals and chips have been exempt from the 10% tariffs that started on 5 April. However, Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a tariff rate on imported semiconductors over the next week, adding that there would be some flexibility for certain companies in the sector.
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The US relies heavily on chips imported from Taiwan, although Trump placed a 32% tariff on products from the country, which has been suspended for 90 days along with nearly all his “reciprocal” tariffs. Joe Biden also tried to bolster the American semiconductor industry during his presidency by granting billions-worth of subsidies via his Chips Act in 2022 that awarded chipmakers who expanded manufacturing and production in the US.
Several global drug companies have also announced investments in the US this year as the sector tackles the threat of tariffs on pharmaceuticals. Last week, the Swiss drugmaker Novartis outlined plans to spend $23bn to build and expand 10 facilities in the US.
