Taipei, June 9, 2026, 00:05 UTC+8
TSMC’s supply pinch is pushing the chip business into new territory. Google is said to have picked Intel for its next batch of in-house AI chips, and Nvidia is testing if Intel can manufacture a separate advanced chip design, according to reports. “AI’s biggest players are racing to diversify a supply chain still heavily concentrated in TSMC,” eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said. Reuters
C.C. Wei’s comments to shareholders last week remain important. TSMC isn’t only a beneficiary of the AI boom; it’s dictating the tempo for big cloud companies as they expand computing capacity. Next up is June 10, when TSMC reports May sales.
Market pressure is clear. TSMC takes up 41.5% of the Taiwan TAIEX index, and together with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the three firms account for nearly a third of MSCI’s Asia Pacific ex-Japan index, Reuters said Monday. HSBC’s Herald Van der Linde wrote that this mix “creates structural challenges.” Reuters
TSMC CEO C.C. Wei told investors in Hsinchu that the company’s global chip supply is falling short of demand driven by AI, and that’s likely to stay the case for years, even with new U.S. fabs coming online. “It will be a long time before we can meet customer demand,” Wei said, sticking to guidance for more than 30% sales growth this year. Moneycontrol
TSMC CEO C.C. Wei downplayed the message after the meeting. “Customer demand is so high, and we can only support so much,” Wei said to reporters. The company is working to avoid becoming a bottleneck, he said. TSMC would “like” to raise prices but doesn’t plan to make fast increases like those seen in the memory-chip market. Reuters
Wei pushed back on questions over TSMC’s next-gen manufacturing and its edge. The focus was on High-NA EUV, an expensive ASML lithography tool for finer chip patterns. WSJ/Dow Jones said Wei told reporters TSMC has acquired these machines and is using them for research, but they’re not in high-volume production yet since the economics aren’t there.
TSMC is still getting some leeway from investors. For 2025, the chipmaker posted consolidated revenue at NT$3.809 trillion and net income of NT$1.718 trillion. Diluted EPS came in at NT$66.25.
This year is moving almost as fast. TSMC reported NT$1.545 trillion revenue for January through April, a 29.9% jump from last year. April came in at about NT$410.73 billion, up 17.5% from a year earlier.
TSMC’s U.S. shares added roughly 3.8% to $431.12 on Monday. Intel climbed 12.6% to $111.65 after the Google report.
The investor crowd is already big. Motley Fool’s Catie Hogan said in a Yahoo Finance piece that TSMC shares are up over 45% this year and trading close to their 52-week high. Hogan also pointed to customer risk, noting Nvidia and Apple account for roughly 40% of revenue.
Risks remain. David Chao, global market strategist for Asia-Pacific at Invesco, said Asian tech stocks are now linked tightly to the U.S. semiconductor cycle, and AI expectations are “too high” to keep moving higher without a pause. One major chip stock missing can send the whole trade lower. Reuters
Taiwan risk is still on the table. At last week’s Computex in Taipei, Taiwan’s defense ministry counted 79 Chinese military planes near the island, according to Reuters. Hudson Institute senior fellow David Feith told Reuters that markets and governments are underestimating the chance of trouble.
Wei’s stance at this point is clear: demand is higher than supply, TSMC maintains it hasn’t slipped on manufacturing, and competitors have yet to show more. But making enough wafers to keep that lead is tough without giving customers a reason to look for another supplier.
