TSMC to see record revenues over GTX 11 GPU / smartphone chip demand

TSMC’s foundries are responsible for many memory chips, SoCs and GPUs released in consumer products these days. This year, the Taiwanese foundries made the jump to the 7 nm manufacturing process, which prompted many chip makers like AMD, Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm and Micron to order in the next gen processors/memory modules. Even Nvidia is ordering the next gen GTX 11 series through TSMC, although these GPUs are using the 12 nm process.

DigiTimes reports that all these orders will bring TSMC record revenues for 2018: “TSMC’s revenues are expected to increase at a moderate pace sequentially in the third quarter before reaching an all-time high in the fourth quarter, the sources indicated.” Regarding the green team’s contribution to TSMC’s increased earnings, DigiTimes informs that “shipments for Nvidia’s new-generation GPUs will play another driver of TSMC’s revenue growth in the fourth quarter”.

Prior to shifting to the new 7 nm manufacturing process this spring, TSMC actually went through a rough patch, as the crypto mining market took a hit and mining facilities stopped ordering new GPU/ASICs. In this respect, DigiTimes notes that, “TSMC saw its June revenues decline 13% sequentially, dragging down its overall revenues for the second quarter by nearly 6% on quarter to arrive at NT$233.28 billion (US$7.63 billion). Market watchers attributed the revenue drops to a slowdown in orders for mining ASICs from Bitmain and graphics card processors from Nvidia.”

Later this year, TSMC is also expected to refine the 7 nm process, while 2019 will bring the 5 nm stepping into focus. Samsung is also intending to make the jump to the 5 nm process next year, while Global Foundries seems less preferred to TSMC nowadays.

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