Wistron opens its first US factory in Fort Worth and starts stamping out Nvidia's most advanced AI chips

Wistron opened its first US factory in Fort Worth, Texas on July 22, becoming the first facility to mass-produce Nvidia's GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Superchips. The $700 million plant employs over 500 workers and aims to reach 1,000 by year-end, producing tens of thousands of computing boards monthly. Wistron shares surged on the Taiwan Stock Exchange following the opening, signaling investor confidence in the binding contract with Nvidia.

Wistron's $700 million Fort Worth plant officially opened on July 22, making it the first facility in the United States to mass-produce Nvidia's GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Superchips, with Vera Rubin chips next in line. The opening ceremony at Wistron's D1 facility in Fort Worth, Texas happened with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Wistron Chairman Simon Lin on stage together. That image matters. It's one thing to announce a $500 billion commitment to American AI manufacturing and quite another to actually stand in a 324,000-square-foot building where the chips are already moving. The Fort Worth plant is the most concrete evidence yet that Nvidia's onshoring pledge isn't just geopolitical theater. Wistron describes the D1 facility as its first US smart factory. The investment stands at $700 million. It currently employs more than 500 workers, with plans to reach 1,000 by the end of the year, and it's already targeting tens of thousands of computing boards per month. Beyond the GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra, the facility is set to produce Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin Superchips as the product roadmap advances. The factory itself runs on Nvidia's own accelerated computing stack, integrating Nemotron and Cosmos models alongside Omniverse and Metropolis libraries for digital twin simulation of production workflows. That's the neat detail: a chip plant optimised by the very chips it makes. Taiwan's stock market noticed. As CNBC reported, Wistron shares surged on the Taiwan Stock Exchange following the opening - a clean signal that investors understand this facility isn't a symbolic gesture but a binding, revenue-generating contract with the world's most valuable semiconductor company. Wistron isn't the only Taiwanese contract manufacturer racing to plant a flag on American soil. Foxconn, which holds roughly 40% of the AI server rack assembly market, has its own Houston facility coming online for Nvidia's GB200 systems. Quanta, the second-largest Nvidia ODM, is separately expanding capacity. The competitive logic driving all three is the same: whoever secures long-term US manufacturing contracts with Nvidia before tariff and export-control rules tighten further gets locked in at the highest-margin part of the AI supply chain. Tariffs are doing real work here. With 25% chip-related duties reshaping how hyperscalers calculate total cost, building AI server racks inside the US lets these manufacturers offer customers a cleaner supply chain - no tariff exposure on the finished system, proximity to major data center clusters in Texas and Virginia, and a story about domestic production that carries genuine political value in Washington. Wistron's revenue from January to July 2025 grew 92.7% year-over-year, per publicly available figures, and a captive US factory tied to Nvidia's forward product roadmap is how that trajectory holds. Frankly, the race between Foxconn, Quanta, and Wistron for US manufacturing footprint isn't purely about patriotism or political compliance - it's about who gets Nvidia's next purchase orders. Nvidia has already booked Wistron's server capacity well into 2026. Being the manufacturer that opened the first US facility to actually produce a next-generation Nvidia superchip carries weight in that negotiation. That's the deal. What the Fort Worth plant means for Nvidia's $500 billion pledge Nvidia announced its commitment to produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the United States over the next four years, an April 2025 pledge that covered everything from TSMC's chip fabrication in Phoenix, Arizona to assembly and testing in Texas. Wistron's Fort Worth opening is the most visible proof of execution on that plan to date. TSMC's Phoenix facility began producing Blackwell chips in late 2025. The Fort Worth plant is now producing GB300 systems at scale. The supply chain is short enough, and the output real enough, that you can start counting boards per month instead of counting press releases. That shift from announcement to throughput is where the story actually lives. A pledge is a number on a slide. A 324,000-square-foot building with 500 workers producing tens of thousands of computing boards a month is a different category of fact. Whether the $500 billion figure ever gets fully realised is a separate question - those timelines stretch years and administrations. But the Fort Worth plant, open today and running, suggests the near-term target is on track. It didn't just announce. It built. The jobs figure, modest by industrial-policy standards, will grow. Five hundred workers today, 1,000 by December. These aren't assembly-line roles in the traditional sense: the facility uses digital twin technology and runs on Nvidia's own AI infrastructure, which means the workforce has to understand both the hardware and the systems managing production. Fort Worth is, effectively, a proof of concept for what American AI hardware manufacturing can look like when it's built from scratch around the products it makes. Also read: Samsung is in talks to take an equity stake in Mistral AI as the French startup seeks €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation https://startupfortune.com/samsung-is-in-talks-to-take-an-equity-stake-in-mistral-ai-as-the-french-startup-seeks-3-billion-at-a-20-billion-valuation/ • Fireworks AI closes $1.5 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation as enterprises flee frontier API pricing https://startupfortune.com/fireworks-ai-closes-15-billion-series-d-at-a-175-billion-valuation-as-enterprises-flee-frontier-api-pricing/ • China signs 29 nations into a rival AI bloc while open-source models do the real work https://startupfortune.com/china-signs-29-nations-into-a-rival-ai-bloc-while-open-source-models-do-the-real-work/