By Muhammad Zuhair
Publication Date: 2025-12-31 10:42:00
NVIDIA is reportedly facing gigantic demand for its Hopper H200 AI chips from Chinese customers, and the firm is now prompting TSMC to take ‘desperate’ supply chain measures.
NVIDIA Now Sees Demand For H200 AI Chips That Is 2x Higher Than Its Current Inventory
We have reported in the past on how newer solutions introduced in China by NVIDIA/AMD are garnering massive attention within Chinese hyperscalers, mainly because the region is in desperate need of compute power to fuel advancements in frontier AI models. According to a report by Reuters, NVIDIA has received orders for up to 2 million H200 chips for next year, while the company’s current inventory stands at just 700,000 units. This suggests that NVIDIA and its supply chain partners will likely need to restart Hopper production, placing significant constraints on companies like TSMC.
The moves raise concerns over whether there could be further tightening in global AI chip supplies as Nvidia now has to strike the right balance between meeting robust Chinese demand and addressing constrained supplies elsewhere.
– Reuters
NVIDIA’s reliance on TSMC for foundry needs is biting them right now, given that the Taiwan chip giant is already facing bottlenecks in addressing demand for Blackwell and related products from hyperscalers worldwide. More importantly, the primary constraint for TSMC right now might not be semiconductor production, since the H200 does utilize TSMC’s 4nm node,…
