TSMC

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• mixed assessment David Friedberg

  they did this super hard thing that requires all this process power built over many years and is super hard to replicate and much less amenable to an AI so physical and because it's all these little things, many of which aren't even legible to an AI. It's like some guy who is in the system kind of knows that you have to do this. Because there's so much demand and because they haven't been able to meet it, they basically cause everyone in the world to seek to copy their moat. That's not a great f

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  For most of its history, Intel's fabs made only Intel's chips. That could be part of what allow TSMC to gain an edge. Serving many customers gave TSMC more wafers to learn from, more revenue to reinvest, and more pressure to hit deadlines.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  TSMC has to run very tighter pitches because they don't have backside power, and they can't do that with high NA, so they have to use double patterning EUV. So for them, it's not very helpful.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  whereas TSMC has said that they don't make economical sense yet for them

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  TSMC transitioned to EUV much sooner. It put EUV into volume manufacturing in 2019 and ramped it up further on its 5-nanometer node in 2020. Intel's first EUV process did not reach products until 2023. So TSMC had about four more years of experience with these machines.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  I also want to point out Taiwan Semiconductor up 13% off of Intel's bad news.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  We saw the a hundred billion out of TSMC, uh, you know, including importantly, by the way, Bill, building a new R and D fab, like not just, not just, you know, a three or four nanometer, but advanced R and D fab in the United States. That's critic. That's critical.

• bullish endorsement Jensen Huang

  the relationship is incredible and, and I can completely trust them. I can completely depend on them.

• neutral assessment Jensen Huang

  Some of them I have to directly, some of them I indirectly, and some of them, if I can convince TSMC, ASML will be convinced. And so that's, that, you know, we have to think about the critical, critical pinch points. And, but if TSMC is convinced, you'll have plenty of EUV machines in a few years. And so none of that, my point is that none of the bottlenecks last longer than a couple, two, three years. None of them.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  We built up an entire supply chain around TSMC.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  AI as a whole this year is going to be 60% of N3. It's going to be 86% next year, according to some analysis.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  You're the biggest customer on TSMC's N3 node, and you're one of the biggest on N2.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  TSMC. I think that's like a very predictable business.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  awarded tsmc 6.6 billion in grants to build more chips here uh some of those chips are already being assembled in a plant in arizona

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  tsmc is making fabs here in the united states so this feels to me like the decoupling from china which is a huge priority

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the new york times does say these servers are going to contain chips made by the taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company uh or you know tsmc one of the world's biggest suppliers of these so they're going to be the chips are going to be made in taiwan

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  yeah they never got too crazy i mean their their their highest was maybe 12 or 13x in in the madness

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  valuation of the company versus their sales so i do they had a billion in sales they're only 7x wow

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  market cap 421 billion this obviously is uh in taiwan it's taiwan semiconductor manufacturing corporation

• neutral fact_claim Naveen Rao

  There's really three places in the world that can build state of the art silicon. Uh, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor. That's the biggest one. And that's where NVIDIA has a deep relationship.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the fabrication of these chips is incredibly complicated i mean they're uh they're they're basically so let's buy the companies they're microscopic yeah and it takes years and like several years to set up the you know the facility to

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  there's no reason we cannot make these chips here sorry i don't buy it that we're we're going to be this dependent forever we just need to have the will and the leadership to say we're going to do this whether it costs us an extra 50 cents per chip

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  we we have a tremendous vulnerability there

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  70 of them uh are fabricated in taiwan

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  the most obvious answer is to invade taiwan and take over tsmc

• neutral assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  in the absence of the silicon that we need from tsmc and a couple of other manufacturers there we have zero capability here

• bearish fact_claim David Sacks

  For example, last year, there was a case where TSMC was discovered to have produced something like 3 million chips that went into the Huawei Ascend 910C chips. I think there's like 3 million dyes or something that went into the Huawei Ascend chips. And I think they're being fined for that. And again, this is all public information. Now, they claim that they thought it was for a company called, I think, Softco. It's basically a Bitcoin, like, ASICs company. But nonetheless, this did happen.

• bullish assessment Lisa Su

  i think the important thing is i mean just think about like everybody wants a gpu right like if you look across the industry you really say you know the people who are going to win in ai want to have as much compute in their foundation as possible and they want assurance of supply we want to be able to supply this no matter what happens and so if you put that in context you know the fact that you're not going for the the lowest cost you know every minute of the day is okay it's okay like obvious

• neutral fact_claim Lisa Su

  it's going to be you know more than five percent but you know let's call it less than 20 percent so low low double let's say low double digits

• bullish assessment Lisa Su

  we've been super impressed with the progress and you know if we look at the the main thing that we look at is you know yields and just how many chips do we get out on a given wafer and i would say it's equivalent between what we get in taiwan

• neutral fact_claim Graham Allison

  So, TSMC, as you all have discussed before, produces the advanced semiconductors for essentially everybody, of whom we're the principal consumer, and we prevent them shipping this to China.