15 ms·
Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
- outside1234 10mo agoHa! 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)
- ericmay 10mo agoIs it karma or is it just normal business activities? When you're a large player like this you get pricing power. If another large player moves in and also has pricing power then negotiations and things like that take place. Business deals, profits, &c. all ebb and flow and this is no different.
- outside1234 10mo agoIt is just normal business. At the end of the day money talks -- and only Nvidia has more money than Apple -- for now.
- cowsandmilk 10mo agoApple doesn’t operate the fab, TSMC does. Apple doesn’t shove anyone out of the way, TSMC makes those decisions. It is weird to blame Apple.
- landl0rd 10mo agoWeird take. If you want to undertake approximately a bajillion dollars in capex to prove out and scale up a new node, it is extremely to have one massive, anchor customer who will promise well in advance to offtake basically the entire thing for a bit and who has creditworthiness exceeded by few non-sovereign entities, and thus is able to write contracts against which it is easy to lend. Also this customer makes little chips (when your defect rate is higher) and bigger chips (when your defect rate is lower). Of course you don't try to synthesize this profile out of a bajillion tiny customers.
- knowitnone3 10mo agoso if you win an ebay auction, did you shove "lesser people" out of the way?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo agoHey Apple, how does it feel?
- knowitnone3 10mo agofeels pretty good. thanks for asking
- hu3 10mo agocustomers will pay the bill so it doesn't matter
- mikelitoris 10mo ago[flagged]
- webdevver 10mo agoapplesisters...
- linkage 10mo agoYou could at least link to a Satania pic
- Fiveplus 10mo agoCalling 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?
- rafterydj 10mo agoI tend to agree with you, feels to me like the root of this is essentially whether foundries will "go all in" on AI like the rest of the S&P 500. But why trade away one trillion-dollar customer for another trillion-dollar customer if the first one is never going away, and the second one might?
- Fiveplus 10mo agoI think it is less of a trade and more of a symbiotic capital cycle, if I can call it that? Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.
- alex43578 10mo agoIsn’t the smaller die aspect more valuable early in the node’s maturity, where defects are less punishing?
- Fiveplus 10mo agoThat is the traditional textbook yield curve logic, if I'm not wrong? Smaller area = higher probability of a surviving die on a dirty wafer. But I wonder if the sheer margin on AI silicon basically breaks that rule? If Nvidia can sell a reticle-sized package for 25k-30k USD, they might be perfectly happy paying for a wafer that only yields 30-40% good dies. Apple OTOH operates at consumer electronics price points. They need mature yields (>90%) to make the unit economics of an iPhone work. There's also the binning factor I am curious about. Nvidia can disable 10% of the cores on a defective GPU and sell it as a lower SKU. Does Apple have that same flexibility with a mobile SoC where the thermal or power envelope is so tightly coupled to the battery size?
- WD-42 10mo agoKarma’s a bit.
- knowitnone3 10mo agonot a word?
- etempleton 10mo agoExplains 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.
- bilekas 10mo agoMaybe I missed something but aren't Intel looking to wind down some of their production ?
- alex43578 10mo agoThe key here is Intel is expanding the idea of operating their fab for an external customer (foundry services). What they’re doing with specific fabs or processes is less important relative to their bigger emphasis on working for a client like Apple.
- coder543 10mo agoNot that I've heard. I searched and I see nothing. Where has Intel said they are winding down chip fabrication?
- bilekas 10mo agoI'm thinking back to over the summer, they were reducing their work force and changing the previous CEO's direction. https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/intel-layoffs-25-percent-scrap-European-projects-Q2-earnings-14a-Ohio-delay/754070/ https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/intel-layoffs-25-perc...
- etempleton 10mo agoIn some areas they may be shifting resources. But a lot has happened since last summer. They have received some cash infusions and 18a is in full production with yields, apparently, at acceptable levels. Rumors are Apple has already signed on.
- 01100011 10mo agoThat'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...
- SecretDreams 10mo agoApple is actually a big reason why TSMC is the king of fabs today. They were a reliable cash source for years before TSMC was even ahead of Intel. Apple can and should do it again!
- nonethewiser 10mo agoFabs are in kind of a catch 22. They need big business to improve and to get lots of business they need to be competitive. Im mostly familiar with that narrative in terms of Intel's current uphill battle - was it really the same for TSMC? I guess maybe there was a similar dynamic except the playing field was more even at that time, so it was a bit less of a catch 22.
- SecretDreams 10mo agoYes, it was. Intel was well ahead of TSMC for quite some time. But TSMC had a diversified and hungry list of clients, with Apple at the forefront. Apple got the taste for wanting their own chips which pushed TSMC to be hungrier. Meanwhile, Intel got fat and complacent. It also helped that phone chips were considerably smaller, so managing yields was easier.
- WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago...and then China invades Taiwan, and nobody ain't getting nothing.
- Antibabelic 10mo agoI feel like China invading Taiwan isn't happening in our lifetimes. Yes, they stand to benefit from it, but I doubt any of the people in charge of decision making are that interested in rocking the boat. There's nobody forcing their hand and the country is doing great without needing to invade anyone.
- marcosdumay 10mo ago> Yes, they stand to benefit from it They would benefit in what way? Because their government seems to benefit a lot from Taiwan existing and being an enemy.
- bpodgursky 10mo agoThey are 100% going to force the issue. It will likely be a naval plus air blockade to force a political solution to avoid the messiness of an invasion, but time is on China's side there.
- alex43578 10mo agoIs time on their side? Long term: demographics are worsening for China relative to now or 5 years ago. Short term: China doesn’t yet have viable homegrown replacements for ASML, TSMC, etc. Really short term: China blockading Taiwan and suffering the economic fallout would be much more painful than US blockading Cuba/Venezuela/etc. A decisive kinetic action or a very soft political action, rather than a blockade seems more viable in the current state.
- redhed 10mo agoThere's some intersection point between long term decreasing in China's ability (demographic collapse) and long term increase in China's ability (their current build up of military hardware in air, land, and sea that is currently outpacing America's). Maybe somewhere in 10-20 years where their regional military power is much higher than America can project across the Atlantic but they still have a lot of military aged men.
- j4uie 10mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ndr42 10mo agoI 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)
- seawsurf 10mo agoI hate this writing as well. Is not about technology and finance? The reporter writes as if it is a novel.
- alephnerd 10mo agoIt's written in "HBS case study" tone. You might not like it, but frankly, ICs aren't the target demographic anyhow.
- achr2 10mo agoThey didn't tweak their prompt styling request enough... The ChatGPT world is depressing.
- webstrand 10mo agoDoesn't seem like LLM generated text to me. Even prior to ChatGPT some journalists preferred to write in a novel-style with extraneous fluff like that.
- idonotknowwhy 10mo agoAgreed. Not a single "this isn't just X, it's Y" in the entire article. Actually quite refreshing to read something written by a human for once.
- afavour 10mo agoThe sheer number of em dashes in the text suggest to me that the reporter didn't write anything, ChatGPT did.
- boxed 10mo agoTim 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.
- dangus 10mo agoOwning a leading edge fab is not practical for most companies, even huge some ones like Apple. Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally didn’t sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop, desktop, and server chip market. Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip fabricator, but there’s no guarantee it would be as good as TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an ability to sell capacity to other customers. At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and outbid Nvidia for priority.
- FuriouslyAdrift 10mo agoApple already is in the process of moving "most" chip production to Texas Instruments in Sherman, TX. https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/22/apple-chips-to-be-made-at-newly-opened-texas-instruments-plant https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/22/apple-chips-to-be...
- btown 10mo agoPer that very article, Sherman will be for support chips for power and peripherals, on legacy 45nm+ nodes. Apple's investing heavily in the TSMC fab in Arizona, due to open in 2027, to have 3nm capabilities for its flagship chips, but it's unlikely that would ever cover a majority of that chipmaking. https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-arizona-becomes-central-hub-in-apples-500-billion-investment-strategy-contentoid36854482/ https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-arizona-... https://wccftech.com/tsmc-plans-to-bring-3nm-production-to-the-us-nearly-a-year-ahead-of-schedule/ https://wccftech.com/tsmc-plans-to-bring-3nm-production-to-t...
- 10mo ago
- j4uie 10mo agopft Emotional intelligence damage ,, instant karma pov: apple be like
- pjmlp 10mo agoWell, someone is tasting a bit of their own medicine.
- 2025codecracker 10mo agoIt used to be „don’t use Wikipedia as an academic source“ now it’s the same wit ChatGPT
- ezst 10mo agoQuite the opposite actually, way too many people treat LLMs as oracles, all the while they are fundamentally unreliable at knowledge storage and retrieval. If there was legitimate doubt in the early days as to whether a collaborative encyclopedia could self organise and self censor into a reliable source, the engineering of LLMs makes the opposite a certainty.
- YmiYugy 10mo agoIt 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.
- re-thc 10mo ago> I would think that if they were serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum purchasing agreements. That would ruin TSMC and others' independence. Nvidia already did buy Intel shares so it is a thing. Nvidia did discuss with TSMC for more capacity many times. It's not about financing or minimum purchasing agreements. TSMC played along during COVID and got hit.
- cezart 10mo agoWhat happened during COVID? Could you please explain shortly what they agreed to, and how it bit them?
- tim-tday 10mo agoHow do you figure? Demand for electronics skyrocketed when everyone working from home bought new laptops webcams, tablets. There was a fire on a TSMC manufacturing line that caused a shortage early on but capacity recovered, demand stayed strong throughout and there was a massive spike at the end when car manufacturers needed to ramp back up to handle all the paused orders. As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.
- re-thc 10mo ago> there was a massive spike at the end when car manufacturers Which barely impacts TSMC. Most of their revenue and focus is on the advanced nodes - not the mature 1s. > As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there. When did I imply there was a demand dip? I said they built out too much capacity.
- captain_coffee 10mo agoLegit 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.
- jobs_throwaway 10mo agoTMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips There's ~a dozen in the works or under construction TMSC plans to have 2-3nm fabs operational in the next 2-3 years So we're 2-3 years behind the standard (currently 2nm), and further behind on the bleeding edge sub-2nm fabs
- techgnosis 10mo agoDon't forget Intel. They are producing chips on 18A right now, with 14A up next.
- alt227 10mo ago> TMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips Are the majority of the staff still shipped in from Asia?
- jpk2f2 10mo agoNo. It was originally 50%, unclear what the current numbers are (it was supposed to decrease over time as they train local replacements).
- FuriouslyAdrift 10mo agoTSMC is already producing at their first one in Arizona (N4 process), second one comes online for N3 in 2028, and third one (N2) broke ground in April 2025 (online date 2029-30) https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm
- tim-tday 10mo agoThe projects seem to go well and then union bosses threaten to shut the whole thing down. Then the essential skilled personnel can’t come train people because the visa process was created by and is operated by the equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities. Sometimes companies say fuck it we’re doing it anyway and then ice raids their facility and shuts it down. I’d post the news articles about th above, but your googling thumbs work as well as mine.
- engineer_22 10mo agoI 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
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoWe have data, people are buying phones in aggregate about every 2.5 - 3 years. Especially in the US where almost no one pays for a phone outright
- Lio 10mo agoI used to think that. I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip. I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM. I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..
- tim-tday 10mo agoApple has made some good progress on memory sharing over thunderbolt. If they could get that ironed out you maybe could run a good LLM on a cluster of Mac minis. Again you cannot today but people are working on it. One guy might have gotten it to work but it’s not ready for prime time yet.
- bigyabai 10mo ago> Apple has made some good progress on memory sharing over thunderbolt The only reason that Thunderbolt exists is to expose DMA over an artificial PCI channel. I'd hope they've made progress on it, Thunderbolt has only been around for fourteen years after all.
- ai-x 10mo agoYou are anecdote, not data. Data is saying demand >>>>> supply.
- tonyplee 10mo ago[flagged]
- BugsJustFindMe 10mo agoIf people want an AI to hallucinate for them they can do it themselves, thanks. Also, https://aramzs.xyz/thoughts/dont-post-ai-at-me/ https://aramzs.xyz/thoughts/dont-post-ai-at-me/
- JanSolo 10mo agoI'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.
- xnx 10mo ago$20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoIf it were only 20B then Apple would jump at the chance. As would almost innumerable others.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoWell, if the future of your company depends on a fab, twice $20B is cheap.
- DetroitThrow 10mo agoCloser to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a fab without ever doing it before, then continually use the brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather than the world at large. You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoIs that true? I guess what I mean is, is it $40B if you are trying to replicate the scale of a TSMC fab? Or could you do it for considerably less if the fab is initially designed to the needs of single customer (Apple)?
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoNvidia 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.
- Squarex 10mo agoIt also means that we will have a trouble buying new laptops for a few next years.
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoThey will simply be more expensive. More likely they will not use leading the leading edge fab process, which TBH is fine for the vast majority.
- tim-tday 10mo agoSneak 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.
- fauigerzigerk 10mo agoAlternatively, China could make progress fabricating and exporting its own chips and designing its own GPUs. The entire chip sector could go the way of solar panels and EVs with prices dropping and margins collapsing to near zero.
- Jackpillar 10mo agoYup, they're also like 5-10 years out from their own lithography machines as well. China wanted Taiwan before TSMC was a thing, by the time they take Taiwan back they won't need TSMC.
- ajross 10mo ago> I don’t know the hedge to position against this Buy in-demand fab output today, even at a premium price and even if you can't install or power it all, expecting shortages tomorrow. Which is pretty much the way the tech economy is already working. So no, no hedge. NVIDIA's customers already beat you to it.
- edm0nd 10mo agoI'm not sure how true it is or not but I heard that TSMC has the ability to remotely destroy all of their main fab equipment in the event the Chinese are invading Taiwan.
- schainks 10mo agoThis is correct: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-tsmc-can-disable-chip-machines-if-china-invades-taiwan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-tsmc... The most advanced ASML machines also cost something like $300-400M each and I am willing to bet if configured wrong can heavily damage themselves and the building they are in.
- qwertox 10mo agoHow about they take a break and focus on their software for the next 2 years?
- tonyedgecombe 10mo agoAre you suggesting their semiconductor engineers should down tools and start fixing bugs in macOS?
- sib 10mo agoOne would think (hope / pray?) that a $4T company could walk and chew gum at the same time. But, apparently not.
- bflesch 10mo agoSoftware quality is just canary in the coal mine that the company culture has changed and they will continue to enshittify their products.
- GeekyBear 10mo agoThis 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-partnership-that-built https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
- roughly 10mo agoThis 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.
- bombcar 10mo agoUS tech companies aren’t built to be like 3M is/was and able to have their hands in infinite pies. The giant conglomerates in Asia seem more able to do it. Google has somewhat tried but then famously kills most everything even things that could be successful if smaller businesses.
- roughly 10mo agoI think there's something about both the myth of the unicorn and of the hero founder/CEO in tech that forces a push towards legibility and easy narratives for a company - it means that, to a greater degree than other industries, large tech companies are a storytelling exercise, and "giant corporate blob that sprawls into everything" isn't a sexy story, nor is "consistent 3% YoY gains," even when that's translating into "we added the GDP of a medium-sized country to our cash pile again this year." Every time a CEO or company board says "focus," an interesting product line loses its wings.
- 10mo ago
- markhahn 10mo agooh, 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.
- api 10mo agoHow 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.
- sylware 10mo agoIt seems PC(mostly dx11/12)+console gaming is niche compared to mobile gaming (mostly on android which support linux/wayland/vulkan)
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoTaiwan'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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mitjam 10mo agoAs 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.
- mohsen1 10mo agothe thing is GLM 4.7 is easily doing the work Opus was doing for me but to run it fully you'll need a much bigger hardware than a Mac Studio. $10k buys you a lot of API calls from z.ai or Anthropic. It's just not economically viable to run a good model at home.
- mitjam 10mo agoTrue — I think local inference is still far more expensive for my use case due to batching effects and my relatively sporadic, hourly usage. That said, I also didn’t expect hardware prices (RTX 5090, RAM) to rise this quickly.
- zozbot234 10mo agoYou can cluster Mac Studios using Thunderbolt connections and enable RDMA for distributed inference. This will be slower than a single node but is still the best bang-for-the-buck wrt. doing inference on very-large-sized models.
- pram 10mo agoFWIW the M5 appears to be an actual large leap for LLM inference with the new GPU and Neural Accelerator. So id wait for the Pro/Max before jumping on M3 Ultra.
- mitjam 10mo agoThanks, that helps me keep things in perspective.
- boredatoms 10mo agoIf theres a market crash, there could be a load cheap H100s hitting ebay
- lysace 10mo agoMy main takeaway: TSMC's gross profit margin in Q4 was 62.3%. (Net profit margin about 48%, supposedly.) I mean this is pretty fantastic.
- lencastre 10mo agowhat a strange world, guess iPhones will cost a million bucks now
- flenserboy 10mo agoOf course they did stock buybacks instead of using their mountains of cash to lock out the competition or keeping their powder in reserve. Brilliant!
- neuroelectron 10mo agoPepperidge Farm remembers when stock buy backs were illegal stock manipulation
- avadodin 10mo agoStock buy-backs can be part of an illegal scheme but, in general, they are one of the few mechanisms in corporate actions through which the regular joe shareholder doesn't get the short end of the stick. How is owning a larger share of a company with proportionally less cash and a higher price per share than what you could have sold it for before bad. Have you looked at precious metal charts as of late? Do 1/x and that's the value of the cash these companies are trading for a valuable business.
- testfrequency 10mo agoPrayers for Apple
- nottorp 10mo agoApple could afford building their own fab couldn't they?
- shevy-java 10mo agoI 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.
- exabrial 10mo agoHopefully this makes them think twice about I dunno, putting chips into cables.
- aalimov_ 10mo agoI think you are referring to thunderbolt cables with their signal conditioning chips, and if that’s the case then I would like to say that TSMC isn’t making those chips. Afaik Intel and maybe some others make the chips that go into thunderbolt cables.
- alt227 10mo agoPutting computers into cars was the real killer.
- 0100111101000 10mo ago[dead]
- tomconder 10mo agough dark mode
- drob518 10mo agoAm I the only one who is excited about the AI bubble bursting?
- BugsJustFindMe 10mo ago"Am I the only one" posts are pure engagement farming.
- neuroelectron 10mo agoApple fabs?
- thenaturalist 10mo ago[flagged]
- dcchambers 10mo agoThe real loser in all of this is consumers. Pricing on software and hardware is going to continue to rise and rise.
- Ylpertnodi 10mo agoYes, but renting a cloud pc will be initially very cheap for consumers - that's got to be good for consum...governments.
- chao- 10mo agoI look forward to Intel announcing that Apple is the major customer they hinted at having for their 14A process.
- maximgeorge 10mo ago[dead]
- wewewedxfgdf 10mo agoI thought this got sorted out with giant piles of cash several years ago, didn't it?
- hu3 10mo agosomeone has a larger pile of cash now
- jlarocco 10mo agoThis 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.
- caycep 10mo agothe 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).
- hu3 10mo agonon Apple consumers were already used to this clown fiesta since AMD processors had late access to SoTA nodes for the very same reason. And possibly other types of hardware also had price bumped or used outdated chips because Apple has to build their iPhone/mac n+1. That's why you see some folks actually mocking Apple about the situation. They were already affected. If anything this might force a market-wide fix in the medium term.
- bigyabai 10mo agoPlus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore. Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their software strategy is so unpopular with everyone. The hardware advances are doing them more harm than good at this point.
- nasreddin 10mo agoTSMC is a for profit business. Why would they care about the moral virtue purity of the applications running on their chips? Seriously illogical statement
- 10mo ago
- amelius 10mo agoApple, now you know how it feels to be kicked out of the FabStore.
- radium3d 10mo agoThis 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...
- bigyabai 10mo agoIntel still hasn't proven that they've got the whole EUVL thing figured out. The best Intel chips you can buy right now use TSMC chiplets on the die.
- signatoremo 10mo agoIncorrect. The best Intel chip you can get is Panther Lake which is made on Intel 18A node, available globally at the end of this month. Intel has already used EUV machines in Intel 7 and Intel 3 nodes, for the last few years. https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/ces-2026-intel-core-ultra-series-3-debut-first-built-on-intel-18a https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/ces-2026-intel-c...
- bogdan 10mo ago> available globally at the end of this month So it's not available yet then?
- philipallstar 10mo agoIt's a trade-off. If it's worked for this long, it was probably a good idea.
- knodi 10mo agoDidn't someone cancel the chips act...
- mekpro 10mo agoI 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.
- macinjosh 10mo agowild to me these two companies have always been at odds and it is playing out on an even bigger stage now.
- KeplerBoy 10mo agothey have not always been at odds. CUDA was even supported on MacOSX back in the day.
- yanhangyhy 10mo agofor 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)
- doppelgunner 10mo ago[dead]
- 010111101000 10mo agoADA 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.
- alexpham14 10mo agoIronic, everything will eventually end in some kind of compromise that benefits everyone. That’s how the giant techs have always played.
- emsign 10mo agoAI 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.
- bigyabai 10mo agoQuite frankly, I prefer that to advertisement and App Stores suffocating innovation and productivity. Hopefully being asphyxiated by AI kicks Apple and Google into high gear.
- walterbell 10mo agoWhich customers have available power capacity to use Blackwell GPUs already shipped? https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/ 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
- jonway 10mo agoApple 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?
- tibbydudeza 10mo agoThat 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.