Yesterday, TSMC held a shareholder meeting, and in an interview following this the company showed every sign of confidence in its future, regardless of the ebbing and flowing of different AI companies that are some of its biggest customers. The world’s biggest semiconductor company even went as far as to say about AI companies: “We don’t need to judge who will win, because they will all come to us in the end.”
That eerily ominous machine translated quote, brought to you by Taiwan Economic Daily (via Wccftech), comes from Wei Zhejia (C. C. Wei), CEO and chairman of TSMC. It comes off the back of of Wei pointing out that both GPUs and ASICs are made at TSMC, implying that whatever kind of AI data centre compute you need, TSMC has you covered.
And it’s true, TSMC does produce most of the compute for AI data centres, with Nvidia’s various Hopper and Blackwell chips being the most obvious ones and the ones that AI companies seem to be lining up for.
Yesterday we covered how TSMC said at this TSMC shareholder meeting that “AI demand has always been very strong and it’s consistently outpacing supply” despite US tariffs. The company did say that tariffs have an impact, though.
With a new $100 billion planned investment in the US and an Arizona fab capacity that’s already apparently sold out through 2027, it doesn’t look like TSMC has much to worry about on the international trade war front, either.
I suppose that with production based both in Taiwan and in the US, it’s not too ridiculous to assume that “they will all come to us in the end.”
Wei reportedly admits that the company did face overcapacity in the recent past, but “this time we are more careful and thorough than before.” This seems to be in part because TSMC is getting forecasts and info from chip-scale packaging manufacturers (CSPs) as “they are also worried that we are not prepared enough.”
It must be difficult to predict demand in such a new and booming market as AI, but if any company can be sure to do well—other than Nvidia, of course—it does seem to be TSMC.
Let’s just hope we see some of that sweet chip revenue trickle down into the laps of we humble gamers in the form of some derivative gaming chips and GPUs. Hey, I’m not above scooping up the scraps, are you?
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