‘Not afraid’: TSMC brushes off mainland chip rivals amid AI boom - South China Morning Post

Amid the global AI boom, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) remains confident in its market leadership despite increasing competition from mainland Chinese chipmakers. At its annual sha... Read original →

TSMC’s confidence is grounded in hard metrics: its 3nm yield exceeds 85%, and 2nm pilot lines are integrating GAA transistors with backside power delivery. In contrast, SMIC’s 7nm remains bottlenecked by DUV-based multi-patterning—costly and low-volume. Huawei’s Tau Scaling Law offers system-level innovation but cannot circumvent fundamental physics limiting advanced nodes. U.S. export controls have ironically accelerated China’s self-sufficiency in mature nodes (28nm+), widening the cutting-edge gap. Over the next 12–24 months, surging AI chip demand will lock global clients into TSMC’s CoWoS advanced packaging capacity, while Chinese rivals pivot to chiplet-based heterogeneous integration to bypass process limitations. Geopolitical hedging via TSMC’s overseas fabs boosts supply chain resilience but inflates capex and operational complexity. The true long-tail effect? Monopoly over advanced manufacturing is morphing into infrastructure pricing power in the AI era.