TSMC working hard to meet chip demand, would like to hike prices - MSN

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chipmaker, is grappling with unprecedented demand pressures from the artificial intelligence boom. At its annual shareho... Read original →

The AI compute arms race is pushing TSMC to a breaking point in capacity and pricing. Technically, CoWoS advanced packaging has become the critical bottleneck, constraining customer ramp-ups and forcing EDA, photoresist, and ABF substrate suppliers into frantic upgrades—creating end-to-end stack pressure. Geopolitically, U.S. CHIPS Act mandates for localized capacity, combined with Taiwan, China’s strained power and water infrastructure, are inflating compliance costs. With Samsung and Intel aggressively targeting 2nm, any TSMC price hike risks accelerating client diversification—especially among cloud giants like AWS and Microsoft betting on GlobalFoundries or Rapidus. Over the next 18 months, the industry will endure a 'pay premium for capacity' phase. While TSMC retains short-term pricing power, its long-term premium is threatened by the global re-shoring of semiconductor manufacturing: once U.S., Japanese, and European fabs come online, its monopoly leverage will erode structurally.