Nvidia Confirms Partnership With TSMC For 14nm And 10nm Chips

Contrary to recent reports Nvidia was targeting Samsung for GPU manufacturing, the graphics card giant is instead sticking with TSMC as its primary partner for fabricating 16nm and 10nm chips.

Nvidia’s partnership with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has stretched back for the past decade, and this is set to continue despite claims TSMC was struggling with the switch to smaller manufacturing nodes. The shift to 20nm was a non-starter, so fears grew 16nm or 14nm fabrication were a no-go for now, but TSMC has clearly allayed these worries.

“We are constantly evaluating foundry suppliers,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive officer, during the company’s quarterly conference call with investors and financial analysts. “We largely purchase from TSMC, the vast majority of our wafers we buy from TSMC. We are in 20nm, we are expecting to ramp 16nm. We are deeply engaged with TSMC for many, many nodes to come, including 10nm.”

Samsung was thought to be a frontrunner for a partnership thanks to its success with manufacturing its Samsung Galaxy phones, it’s already producing 14nm chips in extremely large quantities using its FinFET technology. TSMC meanwhile is targeting 16nm in Q3 this year, before the jump to 14nm further down the line.

Nvidia, meanwhile, is confident the manufacturing node isn’t the be all and end all when it comes to the quality of its GPUs. “There are just so many ways for us to deliver energy efficiency and performance,” said Huang. “I would not get too obsessed about the process technology all by itself.”