Or it would be a two-way safety measure, betting on supply constrains for competition getting produced at TSMC. They have an independent chip source to cover if for whatever reasons they cannot get enough chips out of TSMC themselves and they diverse their second big source of income out.
Remember, Nvidia only has it's GPU business. If at AMD something should have backfired on consumer chiplet-technology, they could at least cover with their CPU and Semi businesses. If Nvidias first try at "real" MCM (not talking HBM here) had problems of whatever kind, they'd still have the other option to cover basic operations. Contingencies. Jen-Hsun really was internalizing what they learned during the first Fermi debacle.
Contingencies are fine but you don’t design your fundamental system architecture around foundry capacity. A sensible contingency is to tape out both a monolithic chip and chiplets. That way if your chiplets go bust you have a backup. However you wouldn’t choose to skip chiplets completely because of wafer supply. On the contrary that would be even more reason to embrace chiplets.
I mean, it's not impossible for Nvidia's consumer GPU chiplets to "not be ready", why I mentioned it was only one hypothesis. But chiplets just make too much business sense, there's no "not the right time to bring it to market", there's only "bring it to market as fast as we can". If their engineers for that are doing AI chiplets first and foremost, then of course that's what they'll do, and the consumer GPUs can wait however long. It'll take AMD 9-12 months (ish?) to go from AI to consumer GPU chiplets, but... maybe it'll take Nvidia longer, long enough that a monolithic arch makes sense, I don't know. Or heck if only takes them equivalently, but Hopper isn't due out till the end of next year, maybe having up to date products is worth the giant investment of a quickly outdated arch just to ensure pressure isn't taken off the competition and their market share is kept up. A new arch in 3 years instead of 2 sounds like a lot, these days.
But assuming TSMC "just has more wafers to throw around" is silly. We know they don't, we know they're booked solid for years and keep announcing yet more new foundries and more investments. "They'll just make chiplets at TSMC" isn't an assumption that can be made at all. Hells imagine if AMD doesn't have enough wafers to go around either. If that's the case, and Nvidia has their arch on Samsung, not TSMC, they'd have AMD soundly beaten in the supply category for consumer GPUs, chiplets or not. AMD would prioritize CDNA2 over RDNA3, while Nvidia wouldn't even have to make that call.
So you don’t believe the rumors that Lovelace is on TSMC 5nm?
If chiplets make too much business sense and Nvidia’s chiplet arch is ready then they would make chiplets. However you’re also saying that they would choose to not make chiplets which presumably would not make business sense. So which is it?
If all the stars are aligned to bring chiplets to market it would be beyond silly to just sit on the tech and not bring it to market due to something as fleeting as wafer capacity. There are so many disadvantages to this including lost opportunities to refine the architecture based on real world experience and massive strategic risk to competitive advantage. So at the risk of repeating myself if we don’t see Nvidia gaming chiplets it’s because they decided it actually doesn’t make the best business sense or their tech simply isn’t ready.