Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

https://www.culpium.com/p/exclusiveapple-is-fighting-for-tsmc

by speckx • 6 months ago

773 476 6 months ago

culpium.com

outside12342• 6 months ago

Ha! Well if it isn't karma that has come for Apple.

(Apple is well known for shoving "lesser vendors" out of the way at TSMC)

ericmay• 6 months ago

Is it karma or is it just normal business activities? When you're a large player like this you get pricing power. If another large player moves in and also has pricing power then negotiations and things like that take place. Business deals, profits, &c. all ebb and flow and this is no different.

outside12342• 6 months ago

It is just normal business. At the end of the day money talks -- and only Nvidia has more money than Apple -- for now.

cowsandmilk• 6 months ago

Apple doesn’t operate the fab, TSMC does. Apple doesn’t shove anyone out of the way, TSMC makes those decisions. It is weird to blame Apple.

landl0rd• 6 months ago

Weird take. If you want to undertake approximately a bajillion dollars in capex to prove out and scale up a new node, it is extremely to have one massive, anchor customer who will promise well in advance to offtake basically the entire thing for a bit and who has creditworthiness exceeded by few non-sovereign entities, and thus is able to write contracts against which it is easy to lend. Also this customer makes little chips (when your defect rate is higher) and bigger chips (when your defect rate is lower). Of course you don't try to synthesize this profile out of a bajillion tiny customers.

knowitnone34• 6 months ago

so if you win an ebay auction, did you shove "lesser people" out of the way?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 months ago

Hey Apple, how does it feel?

knowitnone34• 6 months ago

feels pretty good. thanks for asking

hu34• 6 months ago

customers will pay the bill so it doesn't matter

webdevver• 6 months ago

applesisters...

linkage• 6 months ago

You could at least link to a Satania pic

Fiveplus3• 6 months ago

Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs.

Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?

rafterydj• 6 months ago

I tend to agree with you, feels to me like the root of this is essentially whether foundries will "go all in" on AI like the rest of the S&P 500. But why trade away one trillion-dollar customer for another trillion-dollar customer if the first one is never going away, and the second one might?

Fiveplus3• 6 months ago

I think it is less of a trade and more of a symbiotic capital cycle, if I can call it that?

Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.

alt2276• 6 months ago

Why are foundries going 'All In' on AI? They fab chips for customers, doesnt matter what chips they are and who the customer is.'Who will pay the most for us to make their chips first' is the only question TMSC will be asking. The market of the customer is irrelevant.

epolanski3• 6 months ago

Regardless of that, fab industry is based on a short and mid term auction-like planning.

If Nvidia pays more, Apple has to match.

swiftcoder6• 6 months ago

Regardless of that, fab industry is based on a short and mid term auction-like planning

Not a system that necessarily works all that well if one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the rest.

You can't let all your other customers die just because Nvidia is flush with cash this quarter...

Bombthecat2• 6 months ago

I doubt that we will hit diminishing returns in AI. We still find new ways to make them faster or cheaper or better or even train themselves...

The flat line prediction is now 2 years old...

aaronblohowiak• 6 months ago

Feels like top of s curve lately

eikenberry• 6 months ago

I thought the prediction was that the scaling of LLMs making them better would plateau, not that all advancement would stop? And that has pretty much happened as all the advancements over the last year or more have been architectural, not from scaling up.

sfn422• 6 months ago

You say that, but to me they seem roughly the same as they've been for a good while. Wildly impressive technology, very useful, but also clearly and confidently incorrect a lot. Most of the improvement seems to have come from other avenues - search engine integration, image processing (still blows my mind every time I send a screenshot to a LLM and it gets it) and stuff like that.

Sure maybe they do better in some benchmarks, but to me the experience of using LLMs is and has been limited by their tendency to be confidently incorrect which betrays their illusion of intelligence as well as their usefulness. And I don't really see any clear path to getting past this hurdle, I think this may just be about as good as they're gonna get in that regard. Would be great if they prove me wrong.

riknos314• 6 months ago

Many things that look exponential originally turn out to actually be sigmoidal.

I consider the start of this wave of AI to be approximately the 2017 Google transformer paper and yet transformers didn't really have enough datapoints to look exponential until GPT 3 in 2022.

The following is purely speculation for fun and sparking light-hearted conversation:

My gut feeling is that this generation of models transitioned out of the part of the sigmoid that looks roughly exponential after the introduction of reasoning models.

My prediction is that tranformer-based models will start to enter the phase that asymptotes to flatline in 1-2 years.

I leave open the possibility for a different form of model to emerge that is exponential but I don't believe transformers to be right now.

anoojb• 6 months ago

So let's say TMSC reciprocated Apple's consistency as a customer by giving them preferential treatment for capacity. It's good business after all.

However, everyone knows that good faith reciprocity at that scale is not rewarded. Apple is ruthless. There are probably thousands of untold stories of how hard Apple has hammered it's suppliers over the years.

While Apple has good consumer brand loyalty, they arguably treat their suppliers relatively poorly compared to the Gold standard like Costco.

bethekidyouwant2• 6 months ago

Agreed TSMC can do whatever they want. in 2027 no other fabs will match what tsmc has today, anything that requires the latest process node is going to get more expensive, so your apple silicone and your AMD chips

Forgeties793• 6 months ago

they arguably treat their suppliers relatively poorly compared to the Gold standard like Costco.

I’m not saying you’re wrong but you’re previous paragraph sounding like you were wondering if it was the case vs. here you’re saying it’s known. Is this all true? Do they have a reputation for hammering their suppliers?

boringg3• 6 months ago

Counter argument is that is NVIDIA friendly to their supply chain? I have to think that maybe they are with their massive margins because they can be - their end buyer is currently willing to absorb costs at no expense. But I don't know, and that will change as their business changes.

Your underlying statement implies that whoever is replacing apple is a better buyer which I don't think is necessarily true.

Aurornis• 6 months ago

At this scale and volume, it's not really about good faith.

Changing fabs is non-trivial. If they pushed Apple to a point where they had to find an alternative (which is another story) and Apple did switch, they would have to work extra hard to get them back in the future. Apple wouldn't want to invest twice in changing back and forth.

On the other hand, TSMC knows that changing fabs is not really an option and Apple doesn't want to do it anyway, so they have leverage to squeeze.

At this level, everyone knows it's just business and it comes down to optimizing long-term risk/reward for each party.

dheera• 6 months ago

No public company will be loyal or nice to their suppliers. That is just not in the playbook for public companies. They have "fiduciary duty", not human duty.

Private companies can be nice to their suppliers. Owners can choose to stay loyal to suppliers they went to high school with, even if it isn't the most cost-efficient.

hinkley• 6 months ago

Apple loaned TSMC money in order to build manufacturing capacity back around the M1 era. They’ve done that for a number of suppliers and the “interest payments” were priority access to capacity. Everyone was complaining about how Apple got ARM chips while others had to wait in line.

That said, they did that for a sapphire glass supplier for the Apple Watch and when their machines had QC problems they dropped them like a rock and went back to Corning.

But is that really any different from any other supplier? And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now? They are the cock of the walk.

leoc• 6 months ago

Even if Apple isn't very good at reciprocating faithful service from its suppliers, there's also the matter of how it treats suppliers who cause it problems instead.

boplicity• 6 months ago

Suppliers really hate working with Costco. They're slow to pay, allow for only small margins, and often need too high of a percentage of a businesses revenue, all of which is not friendly towards suppliers.

sellmesoap• 6 months ago

About 17 years ago I worked at a company that was clamoring to get products into Costco, when we did I was shocked at the fees they charged us for returns. If they're the gold standard for supplier relations it's a wonder anyone bothers being a supplier.

internet2000• 6 months ago

Costco does not treat their suppliers well.

VerifiedReports• 6 months ago

They also back-stab their business "partners."

apercu3• 6 months ago

"Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?"

That's the take I would pursue if I were Apple.

A quiet threat of "We buy wafers on consumer demand curves. You’re selling them on venture capital and hype"

bigyabai19• 6 months ago

Nvidia is not a venture capital outlet. They are a self-sustaining business with several high-margin customers that will buy out their whole product line faster than any iPhone or Mac.

From TSMC's perspective, Apple is the one that needs financial assistance. If they wanted the wafers more than Nvidia, they'd be paying more. But they don't.

Tuna-Fish• 6 months ago

Why should that change TSMC decision making even a little?

The reality is that TSMC has no competition capable of shipping an equivalent product. If AI fizzles out completely, the only way Apple can choose to not use TSMC is if they decide to ship an inferior product.

A world where TSMC drains all the venture capital out of all the AI startups, using NVidia as an intermediary, and then all the bubble pops and they all go under is a perfectly happy place for TSMC. In these market conditions they are asking cash upfront. The worst that can happen is that they overbuild capacity using other people's money that they don't have to pay back, leaving them in an even more dominant position in the crash that follows.

ThrowawayR2• 6 months ago

Except AMD would be happy to take up any excess unused capacity that TSMC has to compete with Intel and nVidia.

827a4• 6 months ago

I would also bet significant money that Apple's unique market position will give them the confidence to invest in in-house fabrication before 2030.

eschneider• 6 months ago

Very much this.

paulmist2• 6 months ago

Would it be feasible for them to buy Intel instead? Starting your own foundry would likely take over a decade.

jurip• 6 months ago

They could do it, but I wonder if it makes sense financially. It's probably easier for a neutral foundry like TSMC to recoup the costs by selling the capacity to whomever for years to come. Apple probably isn't interested in getting in the foundry business, so they'd be the ones who'd have to use all the capacity a production line has as long as it's running.

dwaite2• 6 months ago

The R&D and equipment cost for fabrication continues to be closer to exponential growth - which is why so many players have gotten out of the game, why companies with fabs like Samsung and Intel still use TSMC for some parts, and why even Intel is now trying to justify the cost of new processes by becoming a contract fab.

I can certainly see Apple taking a large stake and board position in fabricators, but I can't see them being able to justify the ongoing investment in a closed fab.

Spooky23• 6 months ago

Apple has to price in the risk of the US government forcing their hand in various ways. They have a negotiating disadvantage.

onion2k• 6 months ago

Nvidia have been using TSMC since the Riva 128. That's before Apple started making any of their own silicon. GPUs are easily as predictable as mobile phones.

AceJohnny2• 6 months ago

GPUs are easily as predictable as mobile phones

They really, absolutely, are not.

It's not about "will there be a new hardware", it's about "is their order quantity predictable"

kelnos• 6 months ago

On the other hand, it's not like Apple can just switch fabs without any cost or difficulty. Sure, TSMC is undoubtedly happy to have a customer with predictable needs, but Apple is also subject to some level of lock-in.

jonas21• 6 months ago

AI capex may or may not flatten in the near future (and I don't necessarily see a reason why it would). But smartphone capex already has.

Like smartphones, AI chips also have a replacement cycle. AI chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go bad, but because the new ones are so much better in performance and efficiency than the previous generation. While smartphones aren't making huge leaps every year like they used to, AI chips still are -- meaning there's a stronger incentive to upgrade every cycle for these chips than smartphone processors.

chuckadams• 6 months ago

AI chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go bad

I've heard that it's exactly that, reports of them burning out every 2-3 years. Haven't seen any hard numbers though.

nialv7• 6 months ago

the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow

people are holding onto their phones for longer: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/how-device-hoarding-by-ameri...

to11mtm• 6 months ago

Still more predictable than GPU buys in the current climate. Power connector melting aside, GPUs in most cases get replaced less frequently than cell phones, unless of course you have lots of capital/profit infusion to for whatever reason stay ahead of the game.

Heck if Apple wanted to be super cheeky, they could probably still pivot on the reserved capacity to do something useful (e.x. revised older design for whatever node they reserved where they can get more chips/wafer for cheaper models.)

NVDA on the other hand is burning a lot of good-will in their consumer space, and if a competitor somehow is able to outdo them it could be catastrophic.

ak217• 6 months ago

That's a really hilarious take given Nvidia's history with TSMC.

DeathArrow4• 6 months ago

Apple was favored by TSMC because they brought TSMC more money. Now Nvidia is bringing TSMC more money.

WD-42• 6 months ago

Karma’s a bit.

knowitnone34• 6 months ago

not a word?

etempleton2• 6 months ago

Explains why Apple is looking to diversify their fabs with Intel. If Intel can stay on their current trajectory and become a legitimate alternative they will do very well as a fab with additional available capacity.

bilekas3• 6 months ago

Maybe I missed something but aren't Intel looking to wind down some of their production ?

alex4357810• 6 months ago

The key here is Intel is expanding the idea of operating their fab for an external customer (foundry services). What they’re doing with specific fabs or processes is less important relative to their bigger emphasis on working for a client like Apple.

coder543• 6 months ago

Not that I've heard. I searched and I see nothing. Where has Intel said they are winding down chip fabrication?

01100011• 6 months ago

That's great! Apple has the resources to incentivize and invest in alternate production capacity(Intel, Samsung, or others). Sure, it will take years, but a thousand mile journey begins with one step...

SecretDreams2• 6 months ago

Apple is actually a big reason why TSMC is the king of fabs today. They were a reliable cash source for years before TSMC was even ahead of Intel.

Apple can and should do it again!

nonethewiser• 6 months ago

Fabs are in kind of a catch 22. They need big business to improve and to get lots of business they need to be competitive. Im mostly familiar with that narrative in terms of Intel's current uphill battle - was it really the same for TSMC? I guess maybe there was a similar dynamic except the playing field was more even at that time, so it was a bit less of a catch 22.

WesolyKubeczek• 6 months ago

...and then China invades Taiwan, and nobody ain't getting nothing.

Antibabelic2• 6 months ago

I feel like China invading Taiwan isn't happening in our lifetimes. Yes, they stand to benefit from it, but I doubt any of the people in charge of decision making are that interested in rocking the boat. There's nobody forcing their hand and the country is doing great without needing to invade anyone.

bpodgursky3• 6 months ago

They are 100% going to force the issue.

It will likely be a naval plus air blockade to force a political solution to avoid the messiness of an invasion, but time is on China's side there.

pjmlp2• 6 months ago

That depends on a certain administration, and it isn't looking good, "if they can, we also can".

rob742• 6 months ago

Let's hope China doesn't get a leader like Donald Trump in our lifetimes, then I think your prediction will apply. Despite the political tensions, China and Taiwan are so deeply integrated economically that an invasion would hurt not only Taiwan and the global economy, but also China (directly and indirectly). The EU and the US are making efforts to re-shore some semiconductor manufacturing, but TSMC and others will probably still keep a sizable amount of manufacturing in Taiwan, so I don't think this interconnectedness will change anytime soon...

pixl97• 6 months ago

I mean who would have put 'US talks about invading Greenland' on the list of bullshit we have to deal with.

FuriouslyAdrift6• 6 months ago

2027 is the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and they have publicly disclosed they want Taiwan re-united by then.

tim-tday6• 6 months ago

The leader of China literally publicly told his military to have “all options for reunification of Taiwan ready by 2027”

What options do you suppose the military might be working on? Training to surround, and blockade? (Check) Information warfare? (Check) Building high numbers of landing craft? (Check) Building high numbers of modular weapon systems that can rapidly increase the number of offensive ships? (Check) Building numerous high volume drone warfare ships and airborne launchers? (Check)

Keep in mind that there are public language cues that preceded invasion such as declarations of the invalidity of the other country’s sovereignty, declarations that the other country is already part of the invading country. Have you seen any signs of that?

Your persistent doubts require ignorance of strong evidence.

marcosdumay3• 6 months ago

Yes, they stand to benefit from it

They would benefit in what way?

Because their government seems to benefit a lot from Taiwan existing and being an enemy.

dartharva2• 6 months ago

"They stand to benefit from it" how!? The only thing they'll get is immediate geopolitical scorn which could very well escalate to mass military action considering how much TSMC now means for the world's economy. A single temporary shutdown of the fabs would mean a global economic apocalypse. They'd be inviting all powers of the world to attack them for no upside whatsoever, because it will all be over by the time they figure out how to leverage the fabs themselves.

adventured• 6 months ago

The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it not being cutting edge). And the US will stand-down and let China take Taiwan with no serious conflict in exchange for supply agreements. Not more than 5-10 years out at this point.

The US can't even remotely come close to stopping China in its own backyard today, in another 5-10 years they'll just have that much larger of a Navy. The US knows that's the situation. The US can supply a large one week bombing campaign against China and that's it, based on inventory levels. The US will exhaust its cruise missile supply instantly and the US has almost no meaningful drone-bomb supply. China can build cheap missiles by the tens of thousands perpetually, train them to the coast, and flatten Taiwan and any opponents as necessary. China is the only country that can sustain a multi-year WW2 style bombing campaign today, thanks to its manufacturing capabilities. Imagine them on a full war footing.

petcat2• 6 months ago

The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it not being cutting edge)

USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the US mainland for a long time now. 30% of all 2nm and better technologies are slated to be produced in Arizona by 2030.

The real loser in all of this will be the EU which will be completely without the ability to produce or acquire chips. They'll just end up buying from China and USA, which will only further deepen their dependence on those countries.

alex4357810• 6 months ago

Yeah, I just don’t know that there’s the will to blow up the world economy for which flag flies over Taiwan.

China absorbing Taiwan (especially to Americans) just doesn’t seem like a radical, terrifying concept.

A Hong Kong style negotiated transfer might be best for the world - Taiwanese that want to leave can, the US can build up a parallel source of semiconductors, China gets Taiwan without firing a shot.

znpy• 6 months ago

I think Taiwan invasion by China will happen after foundries are built in the UI.

My conspiracy theory is that there is some kind of "gentleman agreement" on this topic between the US and China.

As soon as Taiwan is not needed anymore by the US for chip fabrication, the US will at the very least loose their grip on it.

Note to commenters: that's my theory, does not mean I endorse it in any way.

ndr42• 6 months ago

I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.

So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)

weslleyskah7• 6 months ago

I hate this writing as well. Is not about technology and finance? The reporter writes as if it is a novel.

alephnerd• 6 months ago

It's written in "HBS case study" tone. You might not like it, but frankly, ICs aren't the target demographic anyhow.

achr2• 6 months ago

They didn't tweak their prompt styling request enough... The ChatGPT world is depressing.

afavour• 6 months ago

The sheer number of em dashes in the text suggest to me that the reporter didn't write anything, ChatGPT did.

indymike• 6 months ago

Clickbait permeates all things. Next thing you know they'll be adding ____ (insert favorite controversial world leader) enraged to the headline.

paulryanrogers• 6 months ago

Or perhaps insert favorite controversial world leader will insert themselves into the real facts of the story behind the title

ai-x2• 6 months ago

The most important signal is actually that demand is far exceeding supply and there is no AI Bubble

Afforess• 6 months ago

Except this makes no sense. There isn’t enough power to run all these new chips, so the demand must be speculative, not growth.

basscomm• 6 months ago

I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.

Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on some guy's substack.

embedding-shape• 6 months ago

"PopFi"

quitit• 6 months ago

There may be an arrogance that we're not vulnerable to these tactics because the topics of conversation are science and tech focused, rather than celebrity culture.

However this post and the comments really debunk that - here we have a clear example of the author turning these people into characters, archetypes of reality tv, and inviting the reader to have an emotional response to what is potentially interesting, but actually just the mundane business matter of dealing with demand spikes.

A normal conversation might take a step back, above the emotional baiting, and instead lament on how TSMC weren't able to develop sufficient supply capacity in time to maximise yield across not just these clients, but many others whom are looking to get involved in the AI hype train. Instead we're seeing something quite different, and quite uninformed. It's reading like a gossip post from an instagram thread.

I notice that HN is actually more vulnerable to these types of conversations. Maybe it's because HN likely weights towards an ASD audience, which has less experience in handling socially driven narratives. I do definitely see here more of the "one-sided" conversation that is typical of ASD.

boxed2• 6 months ago

Tim Cook failing on the Cook doctrine ("We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make") is ironic.

dangus• 6 months ago

Owning a leading edge fab is not practical for most companies, even huge some ones like Apple.

Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally didn’t sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop, desktop, and server chip market.

Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip fabricator, but there’s no guarantee it would be as good as TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an ability to sell capacity to other customers.

At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and outbid Nvidia for priority.

FuriouslyAdrift6• 6 months ago

Apple already is in the process of moving "most" chip production to Texas Instruments in Sherman, TX.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/22/apple-chips-to-be...

runjake• 6 months ago

I'm sure if Apple could manage to run a fab with the quality and costs they get with TSMC, they would. I have little doubt they've been pushing forward on that mission.

boxed2• 6 months ago

I have heard not even a rumor that they are working on something like that.

j4uie• 6 months ago

pft Emotional intelligence damage ,, instant karma pov: apple be like

pjmlp2• 6 months ago

Well, someone is tasting a bit of their own medicine.

2025codecracker• 6 months ago

It used to be „don’t use Wikipedia as an academic source“ now it’s the same wit ChatGPT

ezst• 6 months ago

Quite the opposite actually, way too many people treat LLMs as oracles, all the while they are fundamentally unreliable at knowledge storage and retrieval. If there was legitimate doubt in the early days as to whether a collaborative encyclopedia could self organise and self censor into a reliable source, the engineering of LLMs makes the opposite a certainty.

YmiYugy3• 6 months ago

It seems a bit odd that data center operators aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is. Data center operators say: expand more quickly. TSMC says: we need long term demand to justify that. And all the data center guys say is: don’t worry that won’t be an issue, trust us. I would think that if they were serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum purchasing agreements.

re-thc2• 6 months ago

I would think that if they were serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum purchasing agreements.

That would ruin TSMC and others' independence.

Nvidia already did buy Intel shares so it is a thing.

Nvidia did discuss with TSMC for more capacity many times. It's not about financing or minimum purchasing agreements. TSMC played along during COVID and got hit.

cezart• 6 months ago

What happened during COVID? Could you please explain shortly what they agreed to, and how it bit them?

tim-tday6• 6 months ago

How do you figure? Demand for electronics skyrocketed when everyone working from home bought new laptops webcams, tablets. There was a fire on a TSMC manufacturing line that caused a shortage early on but capacity recovered, demand stayed strong throughout and there was a massive spike at the end when car manufacturers needed to ramp back up to handle all the paused orders.

As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.

weslleyskah7• 6 months ago

And what of the natural resources sustaining all of this? This conglomerate of data centers, gpus and other chips will surely have to push manufacturers to the maximum in other industries. I don't think sustainable energy, recycling and carbon credits will be enough to cover for it.

YmiYugy3• 6 months ago

ASML doesn't quite do overnight orders for lithography machines. There is limited construction capacity to build new data centers. Expanding power generation and grid capacity is also a whole can of worms. My point is just that tech CEOs keep saying "build more fabs" and TSMC saying "we worry about long term demand" and the CEOs replying along the lines of "AI is so big you couldn't possibly have too much capacity" rather than going "here is a contract to guarantee we'll buy your capacity".

jlarocco2• 6 months ago

The data center builders are hesitant, too.

https://youtu.be/K86KWa71aOc?t=483

ip26• 6 months ago

If the long term demand disappears, there may not be anyone left for TSMC to collect from on those MPA. This somewhat undermines their utility as a security.

YmiYugy3• 6 months ago

I think if Microsoft or Google or Nvidia or Amazon went to TSMC and said hey we guarantee to buy 3 fabs worth of chips from you for the next 10 years, they'd probably find a way to make that work.

bgnn2• 6 months ago

Semiconductors is extremely cyclical. One of the reasons TSMC survived the previous boost-boom cycles is their caution. If you overexpand, you risk going out of business in the next downturn.

AFAIK only Apple has been commiting to wafers up to 3 years in the future. It would be a crazy bet for NVidia to do the same, as they don't know how big will be the business.

captain_coffee• 6 months ago

Legit question - what is the current status of the construction of chip production factories in the US?

I know about the existence of the initiative but I don't know how it is progressing / what is actually going on on that front.

jobs_throwaway• 6 months ago

TMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips

There's ~a dozen in the works or under construction

TMSC plans to have 2-3nm fabs operational in the next 2-3 years

So we're 2-3 years behind the standard (currently 2nm), and further behind on the bleeding edge sub-2nm fabs

techgnosis• 6 months ago

Don't forget Intel. They are producing chips on 18A right now, with 14A up next.

alt2276• 6 months ago

TMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips

Are the majority of the staff still shipped in from Asia?

FuriouslyAdrift6• 6 months ago

TSMC is already producing at their first one in Arizona (N4 process), second one comes online for N3 in 2028, and third one (N2) broke ground in April 2025 (online date 2029-30)

https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm

tim-tday6• 6 months ago

The projects seem to go well and then union bosses threaten to shut the whole thing down.

Then the essential skilled personnel can’t come train people because the visa process was created by and is operated by the equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities. Sometimes companies say fuck it we’re doing it anyway and then ice raids their facility and shuts it down.

I’d post the news articles about th above, but your googling thumbs work as well as mine.

engineer_222• 6 months ago

I find that my cell phone which is 4 generations old and my desktop computer which is 2 generations old are totally adequate for everything I need to do, and I do not need faster processing

raw_anon_1111• 6 months ago

We have data, people are buying phones in aggregate about every 2.5 - 3 years. Especially in the US where almost no one pays for a phone outright

Lio• 6 months ago

I used to think that.

I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.

I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM.

I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..

tim-tday6• 6 months ago

Apple has made some good progress on memory sharing over thunderbolt. If they could get that ironed out you maybe could run a good LLM on a cluster of Mac minis. Again you cannot today but people are working on it. One guy might have gotten it to work but it’s not ready for prime time yet.

ai-x2• 6 months ago

You are anecdote, not data.

Data is saying demand >>>>> supply.

engineer_222• 6 months ago

I'm not anecdote, I'm man.

tim-tday6• 6 months ago

But do you use any ai services like chat gpt, Claude, Gemini? If so you’re offloading your compute from a local stack to a high performance nvidia gpu stack operated by one of the big five. It’s not that you aren’t using new hardware, it’s that you shifted the load from local to centralized.

I’m not saying this is bad or anything, it’s just another iteration of the centralized vs decentralized pendulum swing that has been happening in tech since the beginning (mainframes with dumb terminals, desktops, the cloud, mobile) etc.

Apple might experience a slowdown in hardware sales because of it. Nvidia might experience a sales boom because of it. The future could very well bring a swing back. Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)

kouteiheika• 6 months ago

Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)

You don't have to imagine. You can, today, with a few (major) caveats: you'll only match Claude from roughly ~6 months ago (open-weight models roughly lag behind the frontier by ~half a year), and you'd need to buy a couple of RTX 6000 Pros (each one is ~$10k).

Technically you could also do this with Macs (due to their unified RAM), but the speed won't be great so it'd be unusable.

sib2• 6 months ago

Wonderful!

I wish I were in that situation, but I find myself able to use lots more compute than I have. And it seems like many others feel the same.

JanSolo• 6 months ago

I'm surprised that Apple is not considering opening up its own fabs. Tim Cook is all about vertical-integration and they have a mountain of cash that they could use to fund the initial startup capex.

xnx• 6 months ago

$20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.

HardCodedBias3• 6 months ago

If it were only 20B then Apple would jump at the chance.

As would almost innumerable others.

DetroitThrow2• 6 months ago

Closer to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a fab without ever doing it before, then continually use the brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather than the world at large.

You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.

LunaSea• 6 months ago

Apple has around $55B in cash, much more in stocks.

bob10293• 6 months ago

Semiconductor manufacturing is not an incremental step for Apple. It's an entirely new kind of vertical. They do not have the resources to do this. If they could they would have by now.

zvqcMMV6Zcr• 6 months ago

Designing CPUs also wasn't their core business and they did it anyway. Apple probably won't care that much about price hikes but if they ever feel TSMC can't guarantee steady supply then all bets are off.

I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be values by customers?

boredatoms2• 6 months ago

They could buy global foundaries and pour in a pile of cash, 5 years later they’d have something useful

Or they could buy out Intel and sell off their cpu design division

JKCalhoun3• 6 months ago

How do they not have the resources? Certainly they have the cash resources.

At this point it would be corporate suicide if they were not outlining a strategy to own their own fab(s).

cmgbhm• 6 months ago

Apple has very much been wanted absolute flexibility to adopt major technology changes so much they’ve tried hard to not be the sole customer of a supplier and deal with political ramifications (source: Apple in China/Patrick McGee)

HardCodedBias3• 6 months ago

Nvidia direct silicon revenue is higher.

Also Nvidia's margins are higher which means that they will be willing to pay a higher unit price.

This seems like an open and closed case from TSMC's side.

Squarex• 6 months ago

It also means that we will have a trouble buying new laptops for a few next years.

HardCodedBias3• 6 months ago

They will simply be more expensive.

More likely they will not use leading the leading edge fab process, which TBH is fine for the vast majority.

tim-tday6• 6 months ago

Sneak preview of the TSMC shortage that will sweep the world in 2027 when China takes Taiwan and the TSMC scuttles their chip fabs on the island.

I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.

fauigerzigerk• 6 months ago

Alternatively, China could make progress fabricating and exporting its own chips and designing its own GPUs. The entire chip sector could go the way of solar panels and EVs with prices dropping and margins collapsing to near zero.

Jackpillar• 6 months ago

Yup, they're also like 5-10 years out from their own lithography machines as well. China wanted Taiwan before TSMC was a thing, by the time they take Taiwan back they won't need TSMC.

ajross• 6 months ago

I don’t know the hedge to position against this

Buy in-demand fab output today, even at a premium price and even if you can't install or power it all, expecting shortages tomorrow. Which is pretty much the way the tech economy is already working.

So no, no hedge. NVIDIA's customers already beat you to it.

edm0nd• 6 months ago

I'm not sure how true it is or not but I heard that TSMC has the ability to remotely destroy all of their main fab equipment in the event the Chinese are invading Taiwan.

schainks• 6 months ago

This is correct: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-tsmc...

The most advanced ASML machines also cost something like $300-400M each and I am willing to bet if configured wrong can heavily damage themselves and the building they are in.

bob10293• 6 months ago

You don't need to physically destroy anything. All you need to do is zero-fill the storage devices in the facility and walk away. The tools are worthless without parameters/recipes/configuration. Reinventing this stuff is harder than acquiring an EUV tool.

jfoster2• 6 months ago

I wonder if the destruction would actually go ahead.

What's worse, China having a monopoly on production, or the entire world being set back by X years?

In this scenario X is a two-digit number, right?

IncreasePosts• 6 months ago

I'm about 100% positive America would consider that an act of war and respond accordingly.

amanaplanacanal• 6 months ago

It feels like America is already planning to gin up its own wars in its own hemisphere.

strangegecko• 6 months ago

There is no "promise".

The 2027 date was a guideline for their military to be "ready", which they may not be either. That is a far cry from the decision to actually make a move. They will only do that if they're certain it will work out for them, and as things stand, it is very risky for Xi.

charlieyu1• 6 months ago

I have heard about that since I was a child

qwertox• 6 months ago

How about they take a break and focus on their software for the next 2 years?

tonyedgecombe4• 6 months ago

Are you suggesting their semiconductor engineers should down tools and start fixing bugs in macOS?

sib2• 6 months ago

One would think (hope / pray?) that a $4T company could walk and chew gum at the same time. But, apparently not.

bflesch• 6 months ago

Software quality is just canary in the coal mine that the company culture has changed and they will continue to enshittify their products.

GeekyBear• 6 months ago

This piece provides a fair bit of insight:

Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors

In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...

roughly2• 6 months ago

This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though, is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia’s 2025 revenues. Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively, which I’m sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting slow-growth story compared to new upstarts.

I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.

bombcar• 6 months ago

US tech companies aren’t built to be like 3M is/was and able to have their hands in infinite pies.

The giant conglomerates in Asia seem more able to do it.

Google has somewhat tried but then famously kills most everything even things that could be successful if smaller businesses.

roughly2• 6 months ago

I think there's something about both the myth of the unicorn and of the hero founder/CEO in tech that forces a push towards legibility and easy narratives for a company - it means that, to a greater degree than other industries, large tech companies are a storytelling exercise, and "giant corporate blob that sprawls into everything" isn't a sexy story, nor is "consistent 3% YoY gains," even when that's translating into "we added the GDP of a medium-sized country to our cash pile again this year."

Every time a CEO or company board says "focus," an interesting product line loses its wings.

m4rtink• 6 months ago

Yeah, it is insane what areas and products companies like Mitsubishi, Samsung, IHI or even Suntory are involved in.

eldenring• 6 months ago

I think this is more of a result of big US tech being extremely productive (with their main competency)

davedx• 6 months ago

Think Google has done a pretty good job at that actually! Consider their various enterprises that weren't killed:

* Search/ads

* YouTube

* Android/Play, Chrome, Maps

* Google Cloud, Workspace

* Pixel, Nest, Fitbit

* Waymo, DeepMind

* Google fiber

They're not a conglomerate like Alibaba but they're far from a one-trick pony, either :)

sharkjacobs• 6 months ago

It might matter that Nvidia sells graphics cards and Apple sells computers and computer-like devices with cases and peripherals and displays and software and services. TSMC is responsible for a much larger proportion of Nvidia's product than Apple's.

_the_inflator• 6 months ago

I agree. People confuse relative for absolute numbers.

And ironically Apple acts like being a small contender the moment they feel some heat after a decade of relatively easy wins everywhere it seemed.

So finally there is a company that gives Apple some much needed heat.

That’s why I in absolute terms side with NVIDIA, the small contender in this case.

PS: I had one key moment in my career when I was at Google and a speaker mentioned the unit “NBU”. It stands for next billion units.

This is ten years ago and started my mental journey into large scale manufacturing and production including all the processes included.

The fascination never left. It was a mind bender for me and totally get why people miss everything that large.

At Google it was just a milestone expected to be hit - not one time but as the word next indicates multiple times.

Mind blowing and eye opening to me ever since. Fantastic inspiration thinking about software, development and marketing.

zvorygin• 6 months ago

How did you get into large scale manufacturing and production? Was it a career switch? Downsides? It too fascinates me. Any book recommendations?

KeplerBoy5• 6 months ago

Did google ever ship a billion units of any hardware? Can't think of anything substantial.

Apple hit 3 billion iphones in mid 2025.

misswaterfairy2• 6 months ago

Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25.

Worringly for Nvidia, Apple is producing products people want and are provenly useful, thus a vast majority of its value is solid, so revenue streams for fabs Apple uses is solid.

Nvidia on the other hand, is producing tangible things of value, GPUs, but which are now largely used in unproven technologies (when stacked against lofty claims) that barely more than a few seem to want, so Nvidia's revenue stream seems flimsy at best in the AI boom.

The only proven revenue stream Nvidia has (had?) is GPUs for display and visualisation (gaming, graphics, and non-AI non-crypto compute, etc.)

chaos_emergent• 6 months ago

Calling AI an unproven market is a wild statement. My mother and every employed person around me is using AI backed by Nvidia GPUs in some way or the other on a daily basis.

marcus_holmes3• 6 months ago

Because shares are no longer about investing in a company that is making healthy margins and has a solid business, that will pay you a decent dividend in return for your investment.

Shares are a short-term speculative gamble; you buy them in the hope that the price will rise and then you can sell them for a profit. Sometimes the gap between these two events is measured in milliseconds.

So the only thing that matters to Wall St is growth. If the company is growing then its price will probably rise. If it's not, it won't. Current size is unimportant. Current earnings are unimportant (unless they are used to fund growth). Nvidia is sexy, Apple is not, despite all the things you say (which are true).

_heimdall2• 6 months ago

I'm not even sure how to compare revenue, whether relative or absolute, when Nvidia is deeply involved in multiple deals that have all the signs of circular financing scams.

markhahn• 6 months ago

oh, darn. my least favorite walled garden / vertical monopoly / rentseeker will have to raise prices. I'm sure they can spin this as a quality improvement.

api• 6 months ago

How much new capacity is under construction? Seems like it should be a lot, but other than Arizona and Ohio and a few other places I'm not reading about a ton of cutting-edge node fab construction happening.

sylware• 6 months ago

It seems PC(mostly dx11/12)+console gaming is niche compared to mobile gaming (mostly on android which support linux/wayland/vulkan)

burnt-resistor• 6 months ago

Taiwan's TSMC foundries are their nuclear currency: they must keep them to remain protected by others, and yet the others didn't completely build interchangeable and resilient capacity elsewhere to do what essential for them that they had the money to do.

So now Apple, Nvidia, AMD (possibly), and most car manufacturers will be up a creek without a paddle when China invades in 1-2 years. That is unless China's Xi is bluffing to mollify domestic war hawks and reunification zealots by going through the motions of building an army of war machines without intent to use them, but I don't think that's probable. It's possible that Trump already made agreements with Xi to cede "Oceania" if they allow the US to take Greenland and South America for empire-building neocolonialism.

mitjam9• 6 months ago

As a heavy user of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google AI APIs, I’m increasingly tempted to buy a Mac Studio (M3 Ultra or M4 Pro) as a contingency in case the economics of hosted inference change significantly.

mohsen1• 6 months ago

the thing is GLM 4.7 is easily doing the work Opus was doing for me but to run it fully you'll need a much bigger hardware than a Mac Studio. $10k buys you a lot of API calls from z.ai or Anthropic. It's just not economically viable to run a good model at home.

mitjam9• 6 months ago

True — I think local inference is still far more expensive for my use case due to batching effects and my relatively sporadic, hourly usage. That said, I also didn’t expect hardware prices (RTX 5090, RAM) to rise this quickly.

zozbot234• 6 months ago

You can cluster Mac Studios using Thunderbolt connections and enable RDMA for distributed inference. This will be slower than a single node but is still the best bang-for-the-buck wrt. doing inference on very-large-sized models.

pram• 6 months ago

FWIW the M5 appears to be an actual large leap for LLM inference with the new GPU and Neural Accelerator. So id wait for the Pro/Max before jumping on M3 Ultra.

mitjam9• 6 months ago

Thanks, that helps me keep things in perspective.

boredatoms2• 6 months ago

If theres a market crash, there could be a load cheap H100s hitting ebay

wmf2• 6 months ago

You can't run those at home.

mifreewil• 6 months ago

You'd want to get something like a RTX Pro 6000 (~ $8,500 - $10,000) or at least a RTX 5090 (~$3,000). That's the easiest thing to do or cluster of some lower-end GPUs. Or a DGX Spark (there are some better options by other manufacturers than just Nvidia) (~$3000).

mitjam9• 6 months ago

Yes, I also considered the RTX 6000 Pro Max-Q, but it’s quite expensive and probably only makes sense if I can use it for other workloads as well. Interestingly, its price hasn’t gone up since last summer, here in Germany.

PlatoIsADisease• 6 months ago

There is a reason no one uses Apple for local models. Be careful not to fall for marketing and fanboyism.

Just look at what people are actually using. Don't rely on a few people who tested a few short prompts with short completions.

mitjam9• 6 months ago

yes, I'm using smaller models on a Mac M2 Ultra 32GB and they work well, but larger models and coding use might be not a good fit for the architecture, after all.

storus4• 6 months ago

M3 Ultra with DGX Spark is right now what M5 Ultra will be in who knows when. You can just buy those two, connect them together using Exo and have M5 Ultra performance/memory right away. Who knows what M5 Ultra will cost given RAM/SSD price explosion?

mitjam9• 6 months ago

I have researched a bit more and think your recommendations are spot on. The 256 GB M3 Ultra is probably the best value right now even though it's 2k EUR more expensive than the 96 GB version.

utopiah• 6 months ago

Don't buy anything physical, benchmark the models you could run on your potential hardware on (neo) cloud provider like HuggingFace. Only if you believe the quality is up to your expectation then do it. The test itself should take you $100 and few hours top.

mitjam9• 6 months ago

This is certainly the best approach.

lysace• 6 months ago

My main takeaway: TSMC's gross profit margin in Q4 was 62.3%. (Net profit margin about 48%, supposedly.)

I mean this is pretty fantastic.

lencastre• 6 months ago

what a strange world, guess iPhones will cost a million bucks now

flenserboy• 6 months ago

Of course they did stock buybacks instead of using their mountains of cash to lock out the competition or keeping their powder in reserve. Brilliant!

neuroelectron2• 6 months ago

Pepperidge Farm remembers when stock buy backs were illegal stock manipulation

avadodin• 6 months ago

Stock buy-backs can be part of an illegal scheme but, in general, they are one of the few mechanisms in corporate actions through which the regular joe shareholder doesn't get the short end of the stick.

How is owning a larger share of a company with proportionally less cash and a higher price per share than what you could have sold it for before bad.

Have you looked at precious metal charts as of late? Do 1/x and that's the value of the cash these companies are trading for a valuable business.

testfrequency• 6 months ago

Prayers for Apple

nottorp• 6 months ago

Apple could afford building their own fab couldn't they?

shevy-java• 6 months ago

I am very unhappy with the increased RAM prices - and now general increase in prices for hardware. To me this is collusion, a de-facto monopoly. Governments that don't stop this practice are also part of the mafia.

We really need many more smaller, more independent manufacturers. All the big guns, from NVIDIA, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc... have massively disappointed about 99.9% of us here now.

exabrial• 6 months ago

Hopefully this makes them think twice about I dunno, putting chips into cables.

aalimov_• 6 months ago

I think you are referring to thunderbolt cables with their signal conditioning chips, and if that’s the case then I would like to say that TSMC isn’t making those chips. Afaik Intel and maybe some others make the chips that go into thunderbolt cables.

alt2276• 6 months ago

Putting computers into cars was the real killer.

tomconder• 6 months ago

ugh dark mode

drob518• 6 months ago

Am I the only one who is excited about the AI bubble bursting?

BugsJustFindMe• 6 months ago

"Am I the only one" posts are pure engagement farming.

neuroelectron2• 6 months ago

Apple fabs?

dcchambers• 6 months ago

The real loser in all of this is consumers. Pricing on software and hardware is going to continue to rise and rise.

Ylpertnodi• 6 months ago

Yes, but renting a cloud pc will be initially very cheap for consumers - that's got to be good for consum...governments.

chao-• 6 months ago

I look forward to Intel announcing that Apple is the major customer they hinted at having for their 14A process.

wewewedxfgdf• 6 months ago

I thought this got sorted out with giant piles of cash several years ago, didn't it?

hu34• 6 months ago

someone has a larger pile of cash now

jlarocco2• 6 months ago

This isn't really news. Apple has to pay market price like everybody else.

NVidia gets the capacity because they're willing to pay more. If Apple wants to, they can pay more to get it back.

caycep3• 6 months ago

the sad part of this is that volume/priority at TSMC shifting from consumer chips that get sold to you and me, to corporate chips which likely will get sold to OpenAI/Amazon/MS or some other corporate datacenter, means that the un-democratization of computing power is well underway....

mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of modern governments...

(I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card from Jenson Huang).

hu34• 6 months ago

non Apple consumers were already used to this clown fiesta since AMD processors had late access to SoTA nodes for the very same reason.

And possibly other types of hardware also had price bumped or used outdated chips because Apple has to build their iPhone/mac n+1.

That's why you see some folks actually mocking Apple about the situation. They were already affected.

If anything this might force a market-wide fix in the medium term.

bigyabai19• 6 months ago

Plus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore.

Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their software strategy is so unpopular with everyone. The hardware advances are doing them more harm than good at this point.

entropi• 6 months ago

I mean sure it is fun to pick one company and hate it, but this is not the point being argued here.

But the point here is that a few companies are outbidding everyone else, hoarding shittons of compute and putting it into their data centers, to rent to people. This is effectively taking compute ownership away from consumers and centralizing compute i.e. un-democratising.

Apple outcompeting other companies to put their products into the hands of regular people is vastly different.

amelius• 6 months ago

Apple, now you know how it feels to be kicked out of the FabStore.

radium3d• 6 months ago

This all is just spotlighting the weakness of NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, etc. They all avoided manufacturing in-house for so long and now they're fighting for fab time. Intel on the other hand is interesting...

bigyabai19• 6 months ago

Intel still hasn't proven that they've got the whole EUVL thing figured out. The best Intel chips you can buy right now use TSMC chiplets on the die.

signatoremo• 6 months ago

Incorrect. The best Intel chip you can get is Panther Lake which is made on Intel 18A node, available globally at the end of this month. Intel has already used EUV machines in Intel 7 and Intel 3 nodes, for the last few years.

https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/ces-2026-intel-c...

philipallstar• 6 months ago

It's a trade-off. If it's worked for this long, it was probably a good idea.

knodi• 6 months ago

Didn't someone cancel the chips act...

mekpro• 6 months ago

I think the opposite. Having NVIDIA investing in TSMC's bleeding-edge process node should benefit Apple rather than disadvantage.

It means that Apple doesn't have to be sole investor in latest node development which is more harder to justify, especially in the year where smartphone upgrade cycle is slowdown. Having NVIDIA (and AI boom) in the picture should help Apple reduce CAPEX for their semi-conductor investment.

macinjosh• 6 months ago

wild to me these two companies have always been at odds and it is playing out on an even bigger stage now.

KeplerBoy5• 6 months ago

they have not always been at odds. CUDA was even supported on MacOSX back in the day.

yanhangyhy• 6 months ago

for all the comments related to china vs taiwan, i can assue you it will happen. and mostly likely xi will do it. it will be his most great achievement.

There are many influencing factors that foreigners may not necessarily be aware of. In fact, this has little to do with TSMC. Rather, it is that China’s domestic public opinion environment has undergone major changes.

Over the past several decades, domestic public opinion was generally pro-American and pro-Western, and it deliberately emphasized the positive side of Taiwan, while providing Taiwan with substantial economic support. But in recent years the situation has changed dramatically. One reason is that Taiwanese public opinion has spread widely through platforms like Xiaohongshu, VPNs, and other channels(Like the Japanese, they pray for the Three Gorges Dam to collapse and drown large numbers of Chinese people, and they celebrate when natural disasters happen in China.). People have gradually realized that Taiwan is not what we once expected it to be; many people there are pro-Japanese, and economic support from mainland China would only have the opposite effect.

This has actually happened many times in history. There is an old saying: some people only fear force and do not respect virtue. In addition, drastic changes in the international situation, and especially Trump coming to power, have profoundly changed the perceptions of the Chinese people. One can say he was the most critical factor. From that point on, the pro-American camp within China has had very little room to speak. He tore off the so-called fig leaf of democracy and helped the Chinese people establish confidence in their own system.

Regarding the Taiwan issue, mainstream public opinion almost universally supports resolving it through force. Hong Kong has already demonstrated the drawbacks of resolving issues through non-violent means. In many matters, it is actually the Chinese people who are pushing the Communist Party forward, while the Party instead needs to restrain public sentiment and act rationally. Everyone wants to fight and to resolve the issue completely through swift action. If TSMC is destroyed, it does not matter; we cannot use it anyway, and high-end chips have long been embargoed against us. The ones affected will not be us, but others.

Of course, based on my frequent experience using the PTT forum, Taiwanese young people themselves are also deeply divided. Many people have seen China’s progress and are not that hostile, but many others are still trapped in indoctrination. The most ironic thing about democracy is that, in many cases, it controls people’s thinking more severely than so-called non-democratic countries, especially in small states. But none of this is important, because the overall trend is set and unstoppable.

(It seems that no one is paying attention to the fact that China is imposing its most severe embargo on Japan, because the United States has just invaded Venezuela and is threatening Greenland. The United Kingdom and France have just bombed a certain country. You see, when Western countries are doing bad things themselves, they feel embarrassed to accuse others)

010111101000• 6 months ago

ADA RTX 4090 L1 16 Megabytes L2 72 Megabytes

Blackwell 100 8192-bit 8 Terabytes/sec

Blackwell 200 8192-bit 8 Terabytes/sec

Hopper H100 5120-bit 3.35 Terabytes/sec

Hopper H200 6144-bit 4.8 Terabytes/sec

Hopper precedes the Blackwell architecture, implementations of B40 and B100 accelerators circa 2023.

Semiconductor fabrication, either half-node, transistor-gate in terms of identifying the local 90nm semiconductor circuits for clear paths to 10nm node.

alexpham14• 6 months ago

Ironic, everything will eventually end in some kind of compromise that benefits everyone. That’s how the giant techs have always played.

emsign• 6 months ago

AI is suffocating everyone else, it's slowing down innovation and productivity if it's not linked to AI. That's going to be a problem for society and the world economy.

bigyabai19• 6 months ago

Quite frankly, I prefer that to advertisement and App Stores suffocating innovation and productivity. Hopefully being asphyxiated by AI kicks Apple and Google into high gear.

walterbell• 6 months ago

Which customers have available power capacity to use Blackwell GPUs already shipped? https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/

  6 million Blackwell GPUs.. have left NVIDIA’s warehouses.. 15.6GW of power is required to make the last four quarters of NVIDIA GPUs sold turn on

jonway• 6 months ago

Apple should use its bajillions and quadrillions of cash-dollars to spin up a new fab. The Chinese reportedly have EUV in testing right? Maybe there are other partners willing to play ball?

tibbydudeza• 6 months ago

That Arizona TSMC plant - what process node can it do - is the latest ?.

Afiak there is a law in Taiwan that says the overseas plants cannot be on par with local plants iro process nodes - two or one generations behind.

Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

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