Isnt Nvidia from Taiwan?

Nvidia was founded in 1993 in Sunnyvale, California, and is now headquartered in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It is an American company, incorporated in the US, listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Full stop on the legal question.

The Taiwan connection is real though, just not where people usually think it is.

Jensen Huang's background

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, is Taiwanese-American. He was born in Taiwan, moved to the US as a child, and built his career there. So when people say "Nvidia is Taiwanese," they are often thinking of him personally.

Where the chips actually get made

Here is the part that really matters for our earlier conversation about the AI race. Nvidia designs its chips in California, but it does not manufacture them. The actual fabrication is done almost entirely by TSMC, which stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan. TSMC is the world's most advanced chip foundry, meaning it is a factory that builds chips other companies design. Think of it like an architect drawing up plans and then a specialist construction firm doing the physical build.

This is why Taiwan sits so close to the center of the AI race even though neither Nvidia nor any of the big US AI labs are headquartered there. Without TSMC's manufacturing capacity, Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra chips, the ones we talked about earlier that outpace Huawei's best by roughly ten to one, would not exist in the quantities that matter. That dependency is also why Taiwan is one of the most geopolitically sensitive pieces of the entire AI story right now.

So to put it plainly: American company, Taiwanese-American founder, Taiwanese-manufactured chips. Three separate facts that tend to get blurred into one.