AI Is A Modest - But Important - Slice Of TSMC's Business
The Next Platform, Friday, July 21,2023
Given the exorbitant demand for compute and networking for running Ai workloads and the dominance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co in making the compute engine chips and providing the complex packaging for them, you would think that the world's largest foundry would be making money hands over fist in the second quarter.
But alas, even with a hyperbooming AI system sales, that market is still small enough - and the amount of money that TSMC gets from etching and packaging chips is small compared to their street prices - that when the smartphone, PC, and generic server markets all take a bit of a dive at the same time, sales of AI compute engines are not enough to fill in the gap.