Big orders are "smashed"! TSMC's capacity crisis has been lifted, and building factories in the United States and Japan is just a pretense?
After losing its second largest customer, Huawei, TSMC could only focus on American customers, and was forced to compromise the requirements to build a factory in the United States.
After TSMC promised to expand its 3nm production capacity, the true face of the United States was exposed, from the initial request to hand over the core data, to the final request for engineers to help Intel upgrade its production capacity, step by step, the promised subsidy has not been fulfilled for a long time, which also aroused the vigilance of Liu Deyin and others, and directly gave up the application for subsidies.
In order to create the false impression that TSMC cannot do without orders from American companies, the Biden team began to pressure American companies to disperse production capacity, coupled with the weakness of the market under the chip rulesFor a period of time, TSMC's capacity utilization rate declined rapidly, and the 7nm production capacity once fell to 50%, giving people the feeling that no one wanted TSMC's chips.
However, after a period of pulling, American companies finally compromised, AMD, Nvidia, Intel and other American companies were disappointed after trying to adopt Samsung's process, and in the face of huge capacity vacancies, orders could only be urgently returned to TSMC, which also directly filled TSMC's production capacity.
TSMC's technology has always been the world's top, with super-first-class processes and equipment, and it can integrate high-performance and high-density chips under the same process, which is also the reason why it can attract major manufacturers to compete for cooperation, creating the feat of half of the chips on the market from TSMC.
Under the rise of artificial intelligence and new energy vehicles, TSMC's orders began to rise sharply, and AMD smashed large orders at the beginning of 2024, according to market news, AMD plans to mass-produce ZEN 5 chips in the third quarter of this year, which will use TSMC's latest 3nm process.
In addition, AMD has also accelerated its layout in the field of AI chips, and will increase the amount of chips for the MI300 series, which will be produced based on the 3nm-5nm process, and Intel has also determined that the Lunar Lake processor will use TSMC's 3nm process, combined with a large number of orders from Nvidia and Apple, TSMC is not afraid of US sanctions at all.
This inevitably makes people doubt TSMC's intentions to go to the United States and Japan to build factories, and the sudden loss of Huawei's orders must have had a great impact on TSMC, but in order to give itself time to establish a technological advantage, TSMC agreed to the request to build a factory in the United States.
But this shot is the 5nm, 3nm process, many people didn't understand at the beginning, and now the conclusion has been given, this is simply to stabilize the face of the United States, TSMC has no intention of really taking root in the United States, just to avoid deeper sanctions, and now the situation has begun to reverse, and American companies can't do without TSMC's process.
The construction of a factory in Japan is better explained, the highest only supports the mass production of 12nm process, for the current market demand, this is simply dispensable, and there will not be too much in terms of production capacity, the reason why the news of continuous expansion is to confuse the public, so that the top process of 5nm and below in the local layout can be built smoothly.
With such an explanation, Liu Deyin's retirement at a critical moment may be to give the outside world a false impression of "resigning", in order to escape some promises, what do you think about this?
The Year of Science and Technology in China