An incident at one of TSMC’s manufacturing facilities has reportedly ruined tens of thousands of 16/12nm wafers… y’know all those slices of silicon from which spawn Nvidia’s entire current lineup of graphics cards. The problem is down to imported chemicals used in the production process not being as pure as is needed, resulting in contaminated wafers which are then unusable.

This isn’t the first time the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) has experienced some brutal manufacturing problems. Last year a ‘misoperation during the installation process for a new tool’ caused a virus to spread around a number of its fabs, which itself resulted in the scrapping of thousands of wafers.

That halt in production cost the company around $85m, but TSMC has yet to release an estimate about what this latest incident is going to do to its bottom line. But, given that the 16/12nm production node is one of its most popular – with the likes of Nvidia, HiSilicon, and MediaTek contracting the company to make their chips – the manufacturing losses could be far worse this time around.

The report has come from Expreview (via Chiphell) and explains that the wafer contamination has so far only been observed at Fab 14 at the Nanke Technology Park, so it doesn’t look like it has spread beyond that. The imported chemical materials responsible should be easily trackable, and so TSMC ought to quickly be able to stop them being used anywhere else and ensure no other fab falls victim to the reported impurities.

The piece also states that TSMC doesn’t know the extent of the damage yet as the production process means that wafers can only be checked at the end of the line, and so it’s difficult to say how many of them are so far actually contaminated. The estimates, however, put the figure at tens of thousands of wafers.

That could mean a whole lot of potential brand new Nvidia GPUs are in the process of being scrapped. And after what went on in the graphics card market last year, the last thing we need now is another GPU shortage…

It’s maybe lucky for us then that AMD’s new Radeon VII, and its next generation Navi graphics cards, are all based on the seemingly unaffected 7nm node.