Taiwan’s Foxconn Says It’s Building World’s Largest Nvidia Superchip Plant

A woman walks past the Foxconn sign outside the company's building in New Taipei City, Taiwan, on Dec. 22, 2022. Annabelle Chih/Reuters

Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer Foxconn is building the world’s largest production plant for Nvidia’s GB200 “superchips,” which are used to run artificial intelligence (AI) servers, the company announced on Tuesday.

The GB200 chips are a key component of Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell computing platform, which it said would enable organizations to run real-time generative AI on “trillion-parameter large language models” with lower cost and energy consumption.

Benjamin Ting, Foxconn’s senior vice president of the cloud enterprise solutions business group, said the company is building a large production plant to meet the rising demand for the Blackwell platform.

“We’re building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet,” Ting said during the company’s annual tech day in Taipei on Oct. 8. “The demand is awfully huge.”

Foxconn Chairman Young Liu told reporters at the event that the new plant is located in Mexico but did not provide further details, such as when the plant is expected to be completed.

Foxconn also announced on Monday that it will collaborate with Nvidia to build Taiwan’s largest and fastest “supercomputer” using the Blackwell platform, according to a blog post published by Nvidia.

Foxconn said it aims to use the new supercomputer to drive advancements in Taiwan’s cancer research, language model development, and smart city innovations.

“Powered by NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform, Foxconn’s new AI supercomputer is one of the most powerful in the world, representing a significant leap forward in AI computing and efficiency,” said Foxconn Vice President James Wu, according to the blog post.

The supercomputer is being constructed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The first phase is projected to be operational by mid-2025, and Foxconn expects it to be fully deployed by 2026.

Nvidia said in October last year that it is collaborating with Foxconn to develop a new class of data centers, or “AI factories,” that power a wide range of applications.

These applications include the “digitalization of manufacturing and inspection workflows, development of AI-powered electric vehicle and robotics platforms,” and language-based generative AI services, it said.

“A new type of manufacturing has emerged—the production of intelligence. And the data centers that produce it are AI factories,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said at the time.

Foxconn, known as Apple’s biggest iPhone assembler, has invested more than $500 million in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

In August last year, Foxconn announced that it formed a strategic partnership with the Chihuahua state government “aimed at advancing talent training, fostering innovation technology, and promoting sustainable energy development in Mexico’s largest state.”

Reuters contributed to this report.