Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs.

Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?

This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though, is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia’s 2025 revenues. Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively, which I’m sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting slow-growth story compared to new upstarts.

I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.

I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.

So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)

It seems a bit odd that data center operators aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is. Data center operators say: expand more quickly. TSMC says: we need long term demand to justify that. And all the data center guys say is: don’t worry that won’t be an issue, trust us. I would think that if they were serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum purchasing agreements.

This piece provides a fair bit of insight:

> Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors

In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...

Explains why Apple is looking to diversify their fabs with Intel. If Intel can stay on their current trajectory and become a legitimate alternative they will do very well as a fab with additional available capacity.

AI is suffocating everyone else, it's slowing down innovation and productivity if it's not linked to AI. That's going to be a problem for society and the world economy.

the sad part of this is that volume/priority at TSMC shifting from consumer chips that get sold to you and me, to corporate chips which likely will get sold to OpenAI/Amazon/MS or some other corporate datacenter, means that the un-democratization of computing power is well underway....

mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of modern governments...

(I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card from Jenson Huang).

Sneak preview of the TSMC shortage that will sweep the world in 2027 when China takes Taiwan and the TSMC scuttles their chip fabs on the island.

I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.

Apple should use its bajillions and quadrillions of cash-dollars to spin up a new fab. The Chinese reportedly have EUV in testing right? Maybe there are other partners willing to play ball?

As a heavy user of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google AI APIs, I’m increasingly tempted to buy a Mac Studio (M3 Ultra or M4 Pro) as a contingency in case the economics of hosted inference change significantly.

Legit question - what is the current status of the construction of chip production factories in the US?

I know about the existence of the initiative but I don't know how it is progressing / what is actually going on on that front.

That's great! Apple has the resources to incentivize and invest in alternate production capacity(Intel, Samsung, or others). Sure, it will take years, but a thousand mile journey begins with one step...

I think the opposite. Having NVIDIA investing in TSMC's bleeding-edge process node should benefit Apple rather than disadvantage.

It means that Apple doesn't have to be sole investor in latest node development which is more harder to justify, especially in the year where smartphone upgrade cycle is slowdown. Having NVIDIA (and AI boom) in the picture should help Apple reduce CAPEX for their semi-conductor investment.

This isn't really news. Apple has to pay market price like everybody else.

NVidia gets the capacity because they're willing to pay more. If Apple wants to, they can pay more to get it back.

Which customers have available power capacity to use Blackwell GPUs already shipped? https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/

  6 million Blackwell GPUs.. have left NVIDIA’s warehouses.. 15.6GW of power is required to make the last four quarters of NVIDIA GPUs sold turn on

ADA RTX 4090 L1 16 Megabytes L2 72 Megabytes

Blackwell 100 8192-bit 8 Terabytes/sec

Blackwell 200 8192-bit 8 Terabytes/sec

Hopper H100 5120-bit 3.35 Terabytes/sec

Hopper H200 6144-bit 4.8 Terabytes/sec

Hopper precedes the Blackwell architecture, implementations of B40 and B100 accelerators circa 2023.

Semiconductor fabrication, either half-node, transistor-gate in terms of identifying the local 90nm semiconductor circuits for clear paths to 10nm node.

Nvidia direct silicon revenue is higher.

Also Nvidia's margins are higher which means that they will be willing to pay a higher unit price.

This seems like an open and closed case from TSMC's side.

I am very unhappy with the increased RAM prices - and now general increase in prices for hardware. To me this is collusion, a de-facto monopoly. Governments that don't stop this practice are also part of the mafia.

We really need many more smaller, more independent manufacturers. All the big guns, from NVIDIA, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc... have massively disappointed about 99.9% of us here now.

This all is just spotlighting the weakness of NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, etc. They all avoided manufacturing in-house for so long and now they're fighting for fab time. Intel on the other hand is interesting...

Ironic, everything will eventually end in some kind of compromise that benefits everyone. That’s how the giant techs have always played.

How much new capacity is under construction? Seems like it should be a lot, but other than Arizona and Ohio and a few other places I'm not reading about a ton of cutting-edge node fab construction happening.

How about they take a break and focus on their software for the next 2 years?

I'm surprised that Apple is not considering opening up its own fabs. Tim Cook is all about vertical-integration and they have a mountain of cash that they could use to fund the initial startup capex.

I find that my cell phone which is 4 generations old and my desktop computer which is 2 generations old are totally adequate for everything I need to do, and I do not need faster processing

It seems PC(mostly dx11/12)+console gaming is niche compared to mobile gaming (mostly on android which support linux/wayland/vulkan)

The real loser in all of this is consumers. Pricing on software and hardware is going to continue to rise and rise.

I look forward to Intel announcing that Apple is the major customer they hinted at having for their 14A process.

I thought this got sorted out with giant piles of cash several years ago, didn't it?

It used to be „don’t use Wikipedia as an academic source“ now it’s the same wit ChatGPT

oh, darn. my least favorite walled garden / vertical monopoly / rentseeker will have to raise prices. I'm sure they can spin this as a quality improvement.

Apple could afford building their own fab couldn't they?

Taiwan's TSMC foundries are their nuclear currency: they must keep them to remain protected by others, and yet the others didn't completely build interchangeable and resilient capacity elsewhere to do what essential for them that they had the money to do.

So now Apple, Nvidia, AMD (possibly), and most car manufacturers will be up a creek without a paddle when China invades in 1-2 years. That is unless China's Xi is bluffing to mollify domestic war hawks and reunification zealots by going through the motions of building an army of war machines without intent to use them, but I don't think that's probable. It's possible that Trump already made agreements with Xi to cede "Oceania" if they allow the US to take Greenland and South America for empire-building neocolonialism.

Didn't someone cancel the chips act...

That Arizona TSMC plant - what process node can it do - is the latest ?.

Afiak there is a law in Taiwan that says the overseas plants cannot be on par with local plants iro process nodes - two or one generations behind.

what a strange world, guess iPhones will cost a million bucks now

Prayers for Apple

Laughs in Intel.

Well, someone is tasting a bit of their own medicine.

ugh dark mode

Apple fabs?

My main takeaway: TSMC's gross profit margin in Q4 was 62.3%. (Net profit margin about 48%, supposedly.)

I mean this is pretty fantastic.

wild to me these two companies have always been at odds and it is playing out on an even bigger stage now.

Am I the only one who is excited about the AI bubble bursting?

Apple, now you know how it feels to be kicked out of the FabStore.

...and then China invades Taiwan, and nobody ain't getting nothing.

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for all the comments related to china vs taiwan, i can assue you it will happen. and mostly likely xi will do it. it will be his most great achievement.

There are many influencing factors that foreigners may not necessarily be aware of. In fact, this has little to do with TSMC. Rather, it is that China’s domestic public opinion environment has undergone major changes.

Over the past several decades, domestic public opinion was generally pro-American and pro-Western, and it deliberately emphasized the positive side of Taiwan, while providing Taiwan with substantial economic support. But in recent years the situation has changed dramatically. One reason is that Taiwanese public opinion has spread widely through platforms like Xiaohongshu, VPNs, and other channels(Like the Japanese, they pray for the Three Gorges Dam to collapse and drown large numbers of Chinese people, and they celebrate when natural disasters happen in China.). People have gradually realized that Taiwan is not what we once expected it to be; many people there are pro-Japanese, and economic support from mainland China would only have the opposite effect.

This has actually happened many times in history. There is an old saying: some people only fear force and do not respect virtue. In addition, drastic changes in the international situation, and especially Trump coming to power, have profoundly changed the perceptions of the Chinese people. One can say he was the most critical factor. From that point on, the pro-American camp within China has had very little room to speak. He tore off the so-called fig leaf of democracy and helped the Chinese people establish confidence in their own system.

Regarding the Taiwan issue, mainstream public opinion almost universally supports resolving it through force. Hong Kong has already demonstrated the drawbacks of resolving issues through non-violent means. In many matters, it is actually the Chinese people who are pushing the Communist Party forward, while the Party instead needs to restrain public sentiment and act rationally. Everyone wants to fight and to resolve the issue completely through swift action. If TSMC is destroyed, it does not matter; we cannot use it anyway, and high-end chips have long been embargoed against us. The ones affected will not be us, but others.

Of course, based on my frequent experience using the PTT forum, Taiwanese young people themselves are also deeply divided. Many people have seen China’s progress and are not that hostile, but many others are still trapped in indoctrination. The most ironic thing about democracy is that, in many cases, it controls people’s thinking more severely than so-called non-democratic countries, especially in small states. But none of this is important, because the overall trend is set and unstoppable.

(It seems that no one is paying attention to the fact that China is imposing its most severe embargo on Japan, because the United States has just invaded Venezuela and is threatening Greenland. The United Kingdom and France have just bombed a certain country. You see, when Western countries are doing bad things themselves, they feel embarrassed to accuse others)

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applesisters...

Karma’s a bit.

Hopefully this makes them think twice about I dunno, putting chips into cables.

Hey Apple, how does it feel?

pft Emotional intelligence damage ,, instant karma pov: apple be like

Of course they did stock buybacks instead of using their mountains of cash to lock out the competition or keeping their powder in reserve. Brilliant!

Tim Cook failing on the Cook doctrine ("We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make") is ironic.

Ha! Well if it isn't karma that has come for Apple.

(Apple is well known for shoving "lesser vendors" out of the way at TSMC)