The old saying “adversity makes for strange bedfellows” has been proven true, with Nvidia saying it is now willing to work with Intel’s foundry business to manufacture its chips.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang dropped the news on a press call when he was asked . about diversifying the company’s supply chain, which relies on TSMC for its chip manufacturing, and TSMC is both overloaded with orders and in a politically unstable region of the world (Taiwan).
Huang said his company realized it needed more resilience going forward, and so over the last couple years has added to the number of process nodes it uses, and is in more fabs than ever. “So we've expanded our supply chain, supply base, probably four-fold in the last two years,” Huang said.
Huang noted that being a foundry on the level of TSMC is no trivial task but said he was “encouraged” by the work Intel is doing on its foundry initiative.
This is a far cry from the Jen-Hsun who never missed an opportunity to take a dig at Intel. For a while, the two companies had the most acrimonious relationship in the Valley, way worse than Apple and Microsoft back in the 90s.