In order to harvest orders from American companies, TSMC previously chose to invest $40 billion to build a factory in the United States, which not only had a 4nm process chip factory, but also the most advanced 3nm process chip factory at that time. However, the result did not go as TSMC wanted, the United States not only revised the subsidy rules, so that TSMC had no choice but to give up the application for subsidies, and at the same time, Nvidia, AMD and other American customers also chose to hand over some orders to Intel or Samsung.
Giving up Huawei, the second largest customer, and not getting more orders from American companies to build factories in the United States, coupled with the change in market demand, TSMC's order number has decreased throughout 2023, and its revenue and net profit have also been affected by the market, and many foreign media have begun to "sing" TSMC.
What people didn't expect was that the situation had recently been "reversed", first the American chip company AMD placed a large order with TSMC, and then Nvidia, Qualcomm and other American chip companies realized that Samsung's process was difficult to compare with TSMC, and handed over a large number of orders to TSMC. Now TSMC's capacity utilization rate has begun to increase rapidly, and it can be said that the production capacity in 2024 will be full.
The most important thing is that the 3nm process chips that have been "unattended" by the front end of the company have also received a large number of orders. Previously, due to the high cost of 3nm process chips and the lack of obvious performance improvement, in addition to Apple's use of 3nm process technology to OEM A17 chips, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD and other US chip giants were in a wait-and-see situation.
Now, not only Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two mobile phone SOC chips, have announced that they will use the 3nm process on the most high-end SoC chips launched this year, but AMD also said at the beginning of the year: it plans to mass-produce ZEN 5 chips in the third quarter, which will use TSMC's 3nm process technology.
In addition to the 3nm process, TSMC's 7nm process, which had previously seen a sharp decline in orders, has also begun to pick up, and many U.S. chip companies have planned to use TSMC's 7nm process to produce automotive chips, AI chips, etc. There is no doubt that TSMC can be regarded as "boiling out", and it is estimated that the revenue data and order situation in 2024 will improve a lot.
Regarding the situation that TSMC is facing now, many foreign media believe that it may be related to the investment and construction of factories in the United States and Japan. TSMC went to the United States to build a factory in the root to cater to American companies, after all, the United States wants to accelerate the development of local advanced process chips, and has also come up with a subsidy of 52 billion US dollars.
However, due to a series of changes, TSMC continued to delay the mass production time of the US factory. This also means that the United States initially thought that the latest 3nm process chip factory it had obtained, but after mass production in 2027, 2nm and even 1nm appeared, which is equivalent to the United States obtaining a chip factory that is no longer the most advanced.
Not only that, TSMC also showed its intention to "pivot", not only to keep more advanced processes in the country, but also to accelerate the expansion of the scale of investment and construction in Japan. Even when TSMC's first Japanese wafer fab was built, Zhang Zhongmou also said: This will help the revitalization of Japan's chip industry.
After this series of operations, the United States has also begun to be anxious, not only stating that the third batch of chip subsidies will be dominated by non-American semiconductor manufacturers such as Samsung and TSMC, but also many American companies have placed large orders for TSMC.
Now in the eyes of the United States, TSMC's construction of a factory in the United States is estimated to be a "cover", and with the retirement of Liu Deyin, it is estimated that some of the previous commitments will be difficult to continue to count. After all, the United States not only expects TSMC to drive the return of local advanced chip manufacturing, but many American companies are also very dependent on TSMC.
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