NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang said on June 5th that TSMC's stock price is too low, and he agrees with new TSMC chairman C. C. Wei's idea about TSMC's value. Jensen promised to support TSMC in charging more for their wafers and a type of packaging called CoWoS. An article from TrendForce says that NVIDIA...
  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    TSMC knows full well that its monopoly (or oligopoly, depending what you think of Samsung I suppose) is on a timer with the development of the PRC’s chip industry.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      The development of PRC’s chip industry is not guaranteed to go on a exponential curve.

      There are inherently some disincentives to PRC’s approach to managing their chip industry, lots of money chasing limited productive projects (you can bet some opportunistic people in China are going to try and piggyback the money faucet). Essentially no-bid type contracts that are going to create a culture of stagnation (at least partially). Lack of a broad customer base (e.g. Apple essentially bankrolling new nodes at TSMC); global demand will always be way bigger and more sophisticated than China, Russia and Iran.

      Then you also have technical limitations like lack of access to hardware from ASML, more limited (and less competitive) tooling and design ecosystem.

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        01·
        5 months ago

        The PRC chip industry doesn’t need to develop exponentially. TSMC is not developing exponentially either.

        Monopoly pricing is not just broken when w 1-for-1 peer competitor at the same price appears. Monopoly pricing can be broken by a less performant alternative at a cheaper price that is suitable for the vast majority of applications. You can see this in a number of industries where incumbent players are being displaced by new Chinese suppliers who don’t quite make cutting edge stuff but can sell at a fraction of the price.

        Hell, you can see it now with older chips at bigger physical nodes where China is now a significant portion of global production.

        Will the PRC chip industry face many challenges? Of course it will. However, the PRC’s track record of going from nothing to 5nm in a few years cannot be ignored by TSMC.