Joe
Full-Time Trader/Investor, Semiconductor & AI Infrastructure Inflection Points
TSMC will still dominate and remains a good stock to own, though buyers now may be a bit late to the party. It has been a critical bottleneck for the semiconductor industry for half a decade, not just becoming one. Intel is becoming a viable threat and Samsung may eventually become one too. x.comÂ
TSMC is irreplaceable as the maker of the world's most advanced chips for Nvidia, Apple and AMD. x.comÂ
Semiconductor leaders look better placed than high-beta stocks with poor company models. TSMC, ASML, Nvidia and memory should lead the sector and belong in the buy basket, with Broadcom not far behind. The CPU basket is only a hold: much of its upside was priced in during Intel and AMD's run. x.comÂ
TSMC may lose pricing power as performance gains shift from shrinking transistors to stacking, interconnects and optics, while logic folding could make older processes competitive. Despite strong leading-edge demand, investors may overestimate the profit share its node leadership can retain. Its cautious expansion and past reluctance toward advanced packaging suggest a risk-averse culture that protects returns but could leave it late to disruptive technologies and key customers. x.comÂ
TSMC wins no matter which chip carries the hype of the moment. Nvidia GPUs, Intel CPUs, Apple Silicon, Marvell, AMD, Broadcom and trendy smaller names such as Credo and Astera Labs all ultimately feed TSMC, making it a long-term hold. x.comÂ
TSMC will keep posting breakout earnings even as Intel ramps its foundry, announces deals and spends on fabs, because foundry competition is not zero-sum. x.comÂ
TSMC's conservative delay in high-NA adoption will be its downfall as Intel's stitching advances sooner. TSMC's larger-mask alternative requires changing the entire stage and is projected for production by 2033; Intel's stitching is substantially derisked and could be ready for volume production in 2027 at the earliest. TSMC's CoWoS and CoPoS shortcomings add to the concern. x.comÂ
TSMC is the one company the AI chip boom cannot happen without, since every advanced chip runs through its fabs and Apple, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm all depend on it. Q1 profit rose 58% to a record and revenue grew 35% to $35B, with high-performance computing now 61% of sales. It is spending $52-56B on capex this year to build capacity competitors are a decade behind replicating. x.comÂ
TSMC's strong AI demand is straining supply, while solid company fundamentals and attractive semiconductor valuations make an abrupt stop to its advance unlikely. TSMC's Wendell Huang expects 2026-28 capex to be significantly higher than in the previous three years to support customer growth; he says most capex is tied to long-term demand. x.comÂ
TSMC's failure to prioritize Apple marks an irreversible turning point that the market will take a long time to price, even though near-term results won't be hurt. Apple paid development costs for 2nm and saw itself as a de facto shareholder, yet got no priority supply. TSMC is not expanding capacity and told Google to go through back-end partners. That treatment drives customers like Apple toward Intel, and years from now CC Wei's stance will be looked back on with regret. x.com x.com x.com … Show more
TSMC manufactures chips for most of the leading tech companies while Intel still struggles with its own foundry. It makes NVIDIA's GPUs, Apple's phone chips, AMD's processors and Google's TPUs, plus chips for Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. x.com x.comÂ
