Yesterday, NVIDIA's $5 billion investment in Intel and joint partnership to develop customized x86 processors made waves, as the biggest semiconductor names are teaming up to create the ultimate high-performance products for every segment. However, we were left wondering how the manufacturing side of things will work out, especially since Intel operates its own fabs and manufactures a great chunk of its products in-house. Intel also uses TSMC for some of its production. On the other hand, NVIDIA uses TSMC exclusively for its contract manufacturing services. That will continue to be the case with the new NVIDIA-Intel venture. During the press conference, Jensen Huang stated, "NVIDIA and Intel are both successful customers of TSMC. They are a world-class foundry and support customers of diverse needs. You can't overstate the magic that is TSMC. But today, our partnership is 100% focused on the custom CPUs we are building for data centers that can connect to the NVIDIA AI ecosystem."

Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan also reiterated the message: "We both still have a lot of respect for TSMC, and we will continue to work with them." Additionally, the Intel CEO mentioned its own 18A and 14A nodes, stating, "We will still work on 14A and 18A and see if that can be used at some point in the future." Rumors from early August seem to be correct, as NVIDIA was indeed evaluating the 14A node for trial production. While trial production differs from high-volume production as a customer, the approach to Intel 14A involves collaboration with customers . Hence, NVIDIA is likely conducting early testing and providing feedback to Intel engineers, who can then enhance the node before volume production. This doesn't affect any NVIDIA product roadmap for datacenters, which are firmly committed to TSMC nodes for the next year or two. However, it might make an impact in the coming quarters on consumer products or components, such as networking ASICs.