'TSMC needs to work very hard this year because I need a lot of wafers' says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outside a 'trillion-dollar dinner' for top tech manufacturers in Taiwan

Things might be tough for PC gamers this year, as prices continue to rise on everything from memory modules to graphics cards. One person who doesn't appear to be feeling the pinch just yet, though, is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who hosted a so-called "trillion-dollar dinner" in Taiwan this weekend, supposedly named after the market capitalization of the firms attending.

Huang took the opportunity to speak to the press in the rain outside of a Taipei restaurant on Saturday, where he jokingly appeared to give Taiwanese chip juggernaut TSMC something of a hurry up, according to Reuters.

"TSMC needs to work very hard this year because I need a lot of wafers," said Huang, laughing with the assembled press. "TSMC is doing an incredible job and they're working very, very hard. We have a lot of demand this year."

One of the attendees was TSMC CEO C.C. Wei, who did not answer questions from reporters. While the AI boom continues to run its course, TSMC's position as the key manufacturer at the base of the chip production chain has led to some reports that the limits of its current packaging capacity may be a bottleneck, as demand for AI hardware continues to be strong.

Still, TSMC executives have recently signalled that spending on its expansion will rise even further, beyond its current $165 billion investment in US chip manufacturing facilities, and there are reports of plans for four new advanced integrated circuit packaging plants in Taiwan.

"Over the next 10 years, TSMC will likely increase their capacity by much more than 100%, and so this is a very substantial scale-up in the next decade," said Jensen.

As for the ongoing RAMpocalypse, in which AI servers (many of which are powered by Nvidia's high-end AI GPUs) have been swallowing up DRAM modules, resulting in a shortage for the rest of us, Huang had this to say:

"We need a lot of memory this year… I think that the entire supply chain is challenging this year because demand is so much more."

So, no signs of a let up there, then. Certainly, Huang has a lot to be happy about in 2026, as the demand for his company's hardware shows no sign of slowing. Reports also indicate that several Chinese AI companies have received conditional approval to buy Nvidia's H200 AI GPUs for training purposes, including China's top AI startup, DeepSeek—which, if true, may signal the end of a continual thorn in Nvidia's side over the past few years.

As for those of us looking to buy a graphics card or upgrade our RAM for a reasonable sum in the near future, 2026 isn't looking quite so rosy.

While TSMC's expansion may eventually lead to more capacity for key components in our beloved gaming hardware, it's clear that Nvidia's bread is being buttered by AI demand these days, and I doubt regular consumer hardware is going to be much of a priority while the going's so good. On the plus side… well, the key tech industry players seem to have had a lovely night out. How the other half live, ey?