Nvidia needs more silicon manufacturing partners to prevent TSMC from charging a significant premium. Their choices are very limited today, and almost non-existent outside of Asia.
Given a real geopolitical risk and NVidia’s current valuation - 5 billion seems cheap if it secures them an alternative manufacturing partner.
Which leads to multiple questions - if NVidia can't manufacture elsewhere, will the best in the industry get much more expensive? is the GPU value in CUDA or TSMC?
At best, the two companies are locked into a monopsomy/monopoly market for the next 2 years where TSMC needs NVidia to sell chips and NVidia needs TSMC to make them - in the long term, these arrangements are rarely stable. NVidia wants more manufacturing partners, and TSMC wants more GPU makers.
Given a real geopolitical risk and NVidia’s current valuation - 5 billion seems cheap if it secures them an alternative manufacturing partner.