TSMC is the way to own AI chips regardless of who wins the design race. Leadership changes every cycle, with Nvidia ahead, AMD closing in and Google and Amazon building their own, but nearly all of these chips, including TPUs and Trainium, are made at TSMC. x.com 

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.com 

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.com 

TSMC is irreplaceable as the maker of the world's most advanced chips for Nvidia, Apple and AMD. x.com 

TSMC is the single supplier the AI revolution depends on, so owning it means owning the supply chain the world follows. Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Google and Meta all rely on its fabs in Taiwan. TSMC makes up 42% of Taiwan's stock market, which at nearly $5 trillion rivals India's $4.9 trillion despite 23 million people against 1.4 billion. x.com 

TSMC is not a favorite longer term because the US administration and US companies have a stated goal of building a domestic source of silicon supply, and relationships toward that are already being forged. x.com 

Google TPU adoption could broaden the AI hardware opportunity beyond Nvidia, with demand reaching custom ASICs, HBM, packaging, optics and testing. Per The Information, OpenAI reportedly plans to buy Google's TPUs and is hiring compiler engineers, but no purchase is confirmed. Broadcom, SK hynix, Samsung, Micron, TSMC, Coherent, Lumentum, FormFactor and Teradyne could benefit. x.com 

Architecture changes could lift TSMC wafer demand. Shifting from 12-high to 8-high lifts volumes; an on-device AI phone upgrade cycle would be enormously bullish, while ASIC gains over Nvidia help because ASICs use more wafers. TSMC is arguably more vital to AI buildout than MAG stocks and a reasonable extended-AI-cycle play at a not-crazy multiple, barring big macro events. Margins may not expand as capex rises; a Terrafab partnership, if it happens, would somewhat ease Intel competition risk. … Show more

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

Taiwan Semiconductor manufactures chips for competing AI designers, so its upside does not depend on which designer wins. Nearly every AI chip comes from the same fabs; Nvidia, AMD and custom-silicon competition all feed that business. The risk is that the whole AI race slows: 68% of revenue is tied to high-performance computing. x.com