Chip stocks jump as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang asks TSMC to boost chip output

Talking about what’s coming out of Taiwan is a lot better for Nvidia than talking about what isn’t going into China.

On Saturday in Taiwan, CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s flagship Blackwell chips are seeing “very strong demand” — in case the $500 billion in orders he recently touted didn’t make that clear.

TSMC CEO and Chairman Dr. CC Wei, whose company just released its October sales numbers, added that his counterpart “asked for wafers” in light of this hot demand, declining to provide any further details.

Shares of Nvidia are up more than 3% in premarket trading on this seeming reaffirmation of the chip designer’s robust sales pipeline.

Optimism over a potential end to the government shutdown is buoying stocks this morning, and chip stocks in particular are in the green. In addition to Nvidia’s gains, Micron and Advanced Micro Devices are also up strongly as of 6:40 a.m. ET (5% and 3.6%, respectively).

Huang also said that there would be shortages of “different things” when asked about limited supply of memory chips, of which Micron is a major producer. Recent chatter of higher memory chip prices as demand outstrips supply has buoyed that cohort.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said last week’s downturn among tech stocks was a “short lived white knuckle moment,” and expects the cohort to more than repair those losses through year-end.

“We believe Nvidia’s earnings next week will be another major validation moment for the AI Revolution and be a positive catalyst for tech stocks into year-end as investors continue to underestimate the scale and scope of this transformational spending trend over the next few years,” he wrote.

The government shutdown certainly didn’t stop OpenAI from announcing more spending commitments. But, as was the case in March, when higher-beta AI momentum stocks bore the brunt of the market damage despite not being as sensitive to tariffs, this group has also lagged as of late despite not having much direct exposure to federal spending.