Preliminary earnings from TSMC: $35.7B Q1 revenue, up 35% year-over-year, nine consecutive quarters of record profits, March alone coming in at 45% growth year-over-year with the company selling out advanced capacity through 2028. The consensus read is: AI demand is real, TSMC captures it, downstream chip designers absorb the cost.
The harder thing to price is what happens at 2nm. For the first time in a major node transition, cost-per-transistor is going up, not down. The 2nm wafer is landing around $30,000, a 10-20% step-up over 3nm's $25-27K range. The era of Moore's Law cost deflation backstopping every fabless designer's margin model is just.. over.
Watch for whether Qualcomm or MediaTek start guiding for chiplet-heavy architectures as a cost management signal in upcoming earnings. That would tell you the pressure is already biting the decisions being made today.
TSMC full earnings releases on 16 Apr Thursday.