Nvidia’s Taiwan Spending Boom Lifts Chip Stocks to Record Highs

CNBC and Reuters contributed to this report.

Taiwan’s stock market just got another jolt from Nvidia. The Taiex closed at a record high on Wednesday after CEO Jensen Huang said the company plans to spend about $150 billion a year in Taiwan, a massive bet on the island’s role in the AI boom.

Huang made the announcement at an employee event in Taipei, saying Nvidia’s new campus in Taiwan will be big enough to house four times as many workers as the company has there now. The site, called Constellation, is expected to break ground this year and open in 2030, with room for about 4,000 employees. Huang called Taiwan the “epicentre” of the AI revolution, and the market seemed to agree.

Shares of major Taiwan chip names moved higher across the board. TSMC rose 1.3%, while MediaTek jumped 8.8% and Delta Electronics gained 7.2%. The rally got an extra boost from the fact that both SK Hynix and Micron recently joined the $1 trillion market-cap club, a reminder of just how hot the chip trade has become.

The spending plan is huge even by Nvidia standards. Huang said the company used to spend around $10 billion to $15 billion a year in Taiwan just a few years ago. Now that figure is heading toward $150 billion. That is an eye-popping number, and it underlines how tightly Nvidia’s growth is tied to Taiwan’s chip ecosystem, especially TSMC and other key suppliers.

China’s chip makers, meanwhile, had a rougher day. Shares of leading mainland players slid on Wednesday after earlier gains tied to Huawei’s semiconductor push faded. Nvidia’s own position in China remains complicated, with regulatory hurdles tightening even as the company’s Taiwan business keeps expanding.