Nvidia’s Mexico-Made AI Servers Likely Exempt From US Tariffs: Analyst

While Nvidia’s AI server products assembled in Mexico are likely exempt from U.S. tariffs, such products that are made in Taiwan will be subject to the imminent 32 percent import tax the White House announced on Taiwanese goods last week, according to Bernstein Research.

While U.S. tariffs are expected to impact Nvidia’s AI server products that are sourced from Taiwan, such products coming from Mexico—which represent most of its U.S. shipments—are believed to be exempt from import taxes, according to a Wall Street analyst firm.

In a Monday research note, Bernstein Research said that Nvidia’s Mexico-sourced AI server products such as the DGX servers and HGX server boards “should be exempt” from U.S. tariffs because they’re covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.

However, the 32 percent tariff that is set to hit Taiwanese goods on Wednesday is expected to impact Nvidia’s AI server products built in the island nation, Stacy Rasgon, Bernstein’s managing director and senior analyst for U.S. semiconductors, told CRN in an email.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.

Bernstein said most of the AI servers Nvidia ships to the U.S. “likely come from Mexico.” This is based on U.S. import data showing that roughly 60 percent of AI servers come from Mexico and the other approximately 30 percent arrive from Taiwan, which covers more than just Nvidia but is “probably representative” of its activity, according to Bernstein.

Nvidia’s level of AI server production in Mexico is “likely” to rise as the company’s suppliers build more plants in the country, the analyst firm said. Foxconn, for example, is building a $900 million assembly plant for servers using Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GB200 Superchips, and it’s expected to open by early 2026, Bloomberg reported last month.

Bernstein called the exemption for Mexico-sourced AI servers “one (small) silver lining amid the recent chaos” caused by Trump’s ever-changing posture on tariffs.

“Among the many questions we fielded last week, one of the most frequent involved whether or not [Nvidia’s] AI data center products would be subject to tariffs,” it said.

The president’s tariff regime expanded last Wednesday with so-called “reciprocal tariffs” targeting roughly 60 countries and regions, including Taiwan, in a move Trump said is meant to boost the U.S. economy and “protect American workers.”

The across-the-board tariffs have prompted at least some targeted countries and regions to seek new trade deals with the U.S. This includes Taiwan, whose president vowed on Sunday to lower tariffs on U.S. goods to zero and boost its investments in the country.

Tariffs Expand As Nvidia Plots Next Stage Of Growth

Trump’s escalation on tariffs came a little more than two weeks after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pitched the next stage of growth for the company, which more than doubled revenue to $130.5 billion last year due to ramping AI development across the tech industry.

“The amount of computation we need at this point as a result of agentic AI, as a result of reasoning, is easily 100 times more than we thought we needed this time last year,” Huang said last month at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 event, where the AI computing giant revealed an expanded road map of AI server products through 2028.

An executive at a top U.S. Nvidia channel partner told CRN on Monday that he wished he had a “decoder ring” to figure out how tariffs will impact pricing for the Nvidia-based products his company sells, as he has been “asking about this almost every day.”

“There hasn’t been any impact stated to us yet, especially around DGX, which is most of my interest,” said Andy Lin, CTO and vice president of strategy and innovation of Houston-based Mark III Systems, which won in the 2025 Americas Nvidia Partner Network awards.

Nvidia’s OEMs, on the other hand, have told Lin’s company that “things are really dynamic and that they’re going to change,” he said.

Without any immediate answers, Lin said Mark III has already seen a couple orders for Nvidia-based products from customers since Friday out of fear that prices could go up.

“The rationale was, ‘We don’t want to gamble. We want to buy right now,’” he said.

Lin said he’s been telling customers that “nobody really knows what’s about to happen as far as pricing, and any of the proposals that we’re putting in front of them are subject to change.”

“We’re obviously going to do our part to make sure it’s stable, because many of these expenditures are significant for them,” he said. “But obviously we’re just an amplification of the current state of the economy in the space.”

Lin said he hopes the U.S. government exempts AI servers from tariffs because of how strategic AI infrastructure is to “where the United States wants to go.”

“It would be completely self-defeating to also apply tariffs to those, especially when you’re trying to compete,” he said.