Led by Nvidia, the AI industry has plans to reindustrialise America
They go beyond genuflecting to Donald Trump
BEFORE CO-FOUNDING Nvidia, the pioneer of artificial-intelligence (AI) chips, Jensen Huang was a busboy at Denny’s, a restaurant chain. He playfully reminded people of this on October 28th while delivering water to panellists at his firm’s first big jamboree in Washington, DC. From busboy to billionaire, Mr Huang is now also in service to President Donald Trump. Shortly after he made a keynote speech peppered with tributes to the president, he flew to South Korea to accompany him as he prepared for trade talks with China.
Many people look askance at the way the tech elite has cosied up to the president. But the boss of the world’s most valuable firm, who once kept his distance from politics, says he is “incredibly proud" that Nvidia is contributing to Mr Trump’s new White House ballroom. Moreover, he is doubling down by pledging to help President Trump reindustrialise America.
That may be mostly calculated to win the president’s support in convincing China to reopen its market to Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). It also involves significant rebranding of existing plans. Yet it is meaningful, nonetheless.
It begins with chipmaking. In mid-October, nine months after the president told Mr Huang that he wanted to reshore manufacturing, TSMC, a Taiwan-based semiconductor maker, produced a wafer for Nvidia’s most advanced GPU, called Blackwell, at its Arizona fab. Mr Huang said Blackwell’s processors, memory and packaging will all soon be made in America—though it is likely to take a long time before production happens at scale.
His efforts extend to robotics. AI, the Nvidia boss said, was enabling firms like Foxconn, another Taiwanese manufacturer once joined at the hip to China, to build fully robotic factories in America that will be run via AI-created simulations, or “digital twins", using Nvidia technology. To offset labour shortages, some factories will eventually produce AI-powered robots—humanoid and otherwise.
It is not just Nvidia. Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, is also placing bets on America’s high-tech manufacturing renaissance. On October 28th one of his former acolytes, James Proud, a London-born entrepreneur, unveiled a plan to create a chipmaking machine in America to revive semiconductor production. Using advanced X-ray lithography, his firm, Substrate, aims to take on ASML, the Dutch firm that is the sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography used in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
It is a huge challenge. But Substrate has raised $100m at a valuation of $1bn, backed by venture-capital firms such as Mr Thiel’s Founders Fund. Eventually it hopes to support chipmaking foundries across America, reducing the country’s vulnerability to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Most believe we will fail. But this is important enough to do," says Mr Proud.
Full-scale reshoring remains a quixotic endeavour and is based on flawed economics. The president’s ability to sway corporate decision-making is concerning. And there are also bottlenecks. Mr Huang praised Mr Trump for his “pro-energy" policies, but his administration has discouraged clean-energy sources such as wind. Its immigration crackdown has affected skilled and unskilled labour.
Silicon Valley has long attributed its success to its distance from Washington. Yet the more AI hinges not just on digital technology but on chips, data centres and grids, the more politics matters. Rightly or wrongly, Mr Huang is acting on that. At the end of his keynote, he thanked the audience for their “service in making America great again." On October 29th Nvidia became the world’s first $5trn company.
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