The U.S. Data Center Build-Out Depends on GPU Imports

Efforts to onshore GPU and server production are underway, but U.S. firms will remain reliant on Taiwan through at least 2028.   

  1. Data center construction is surging as firms rush to build infrastructure to meet growing demand for AI. According to December 2025 U.S. census survey data on construction spending, private spending on U.S. data center construction increased by almost 80 percent in 2025 compared to 2023. Server chips (GPUs) represent the single largest component of modern data center capital expenditures, accounting for at least 45 percent of total investment, by CSIS estimates. For now, the United States must import GPUs—although the chips are designed by U.S. firms, they are produced and packaged almost entirely in Taiwan.
  2. In October 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that Blackwell wafers were in full production at TSMC’s Arizona Fab 21. While an important step, reliance on Taiwan will remain until planned memory production and advanced packaging facilities open in the United States, which likely won’t happen until 2028 at the soonest. For now, the silicon made in Arizona must be shipped to Taiwan for advanced packaging with high bandwidth memory. Imports of the finished GPUs could be subject to the pending Section 232 semiconductor tariff, unless either routed through Mexico for assembly or exempted through a tariff offset program.
  3. Nvidia has a large and growing server assembly footprint in Mexico. Throughout the tariff uncertainty of 2025, U.S. and Taiwanese firms planned to take advantage of an exception under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which treats servers and GPUs as “originating goods” when shipped from Mexico to the United States, regardless of their country of origin. Tariff exceptions in April 2025 and carveouts in the February 2026 Agreement on Reciprocal Trade ultimately made this unnecessary, but U.S. server and GPU imports from Mexico still increased by $40 billion compared to 2024. Mexico’s imports of the same items from Taiwan increased by $24 billion. 

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Kate Koren

Kate Koren

Deputy Director, Economics Program and Scholl Chair in International Business

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