Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?
However, everyone knows that good faith reciprocity at that scale is not rewarded. Apple is ruthless. There are probably thousands of untold stories of how hard Apple has hammered it's suppliers over the years.
While Apple has good consumer brand loyalty, they arguably treat their suppliers relatively poorly compared to the Gold standard like Costco.
Changing fabs is non-trivial. If they pushed Apple to a point where they had to find an alternative (which is another story) and Apple did switch, they would have to work extra hard to get them back in the future. Apple wouldn't want to invest twice in changing back and forth.
On the other hand, TSMC knows that changing fabs is not really an option and Apple doesn't want to do it anyway, so they have leverage to squeeze.
At this level, everyone knows it's just business and it comes down to optimizing long-term risk/reward for each party.
There are rumours that Intel might have won some business from them in 2 years. I could totally see Apple turning to Intel for the Mac chips, since they're much lower volume. I know it sounds crazy, we just got rid of Intel, but I'm talking using Intel as a fab, not going back to x86. Those are done.
They did had the expertise building it after all. What would happen, if TSMC now would build a M1 clone? I doubt this is a way anyone wants to go, but it seems a implied threat to me that is calculated in.
> "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
The falling out with Samsung was related, but more about the physical look of the phone
Is there anyone who can match TSMC at this point for the top of the line M or A chips? Even if Intel was ready and Apple wanted to would they be able to supply even 10% of what Apple needs for the yearly iPhone supply?
And anyway consumers don't really need beefy devices nowadays. Running local LLM on a smartphone is a terrible idea due to battery life and no graphics card; AI is going to be running on servers for quite some time if not forever.
It's almost as if there is a constant war to suppress engineer wages... That's the only variable being affected here which could benefit from increased competition.
If tech sector is so anti-competitive, the government should just seize it and nationalize it. It's not capitalism when these megacorps put all this superficial pressure but end up making deals all the time. We need more competition, no deals! If they don't have competition, might as well have communism.
Government jobs should only be an option if there are enough social benefits.
I've met many software engineers who call themselves communists. I can kind of understand. This kind of communist-like bureaucracy doesn't work well in a capitalist environment.
It's painful to work in tech. It's like our hands are tied and are forced to do things in a way we know is inefficient. Companies use 'security' as an excuse to restrict options (tools and platforms), treat engineers as replaceable cogs as an alternative to trusting them to do their job properly... And the companies harvest what they sow. They get reliable cogs, well versed in compliance and groupthink and also coincidentally full-blown communists; they're the only engineers remaining who actually enjoy the insane bureaucracy and the social climbing opportunities it represents given the lack of talent.
I'm going through a computer engineering degree at the moment, but I am thinking about pursuing Law later on.
Looking at other paths: Medicine requires expensive schooling and isn't really an option after a certain age and law, on the other hand, opened its doors too widely and now has a large underclass of people with third-tier law degrees.
Perhaps you can try to accept the realities of the system while trying to live the best life that you can?
Psyching yourself all the way, trying to find some sort of escape towards a good life with freedom later on...
Your underlying statement implies that whoever is replacing apple is a better buyer which I don't think is necessarily true.
The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.
And thats probably because Nintendo isn’t adding any pressure to neither TSMC nor Nvidia capacity wise; iirc Nintendo uses something like Maxwell or Pascal on really mature processes for Switch chips/socs.
I shot a video at CNET in probably 2011 which was a single touchscreen display (i think it was the APX 2500 prototype iirc?) and it has the precise dimensions to the switch 1.
Nintendo was reluctantly a hardware company... they're a game company who can make hardware, but they know they're best when they own the stack.
That means deprioritizing your largest customer.
Also theres the devil you know and the devil you dont know.
> According to Han, Nvidia has been difficult to work with for some time now. Like all other GPU board partners, EVGA is only told the price of new products when they're revealed to everyone on stage, making planning difficult when launches occur soon after. Nvidia also has tight control over the pricing of GPUs, limiting what partners can do to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/evga-terminates-relationsh...
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/investigation-confir...
That said, they did that for a sapphire glass supplier for the Apple Watch and when their machines had QC problems they dropped them like a rock and went back to Corning.
But is that really any different from any other supplier? And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now? They are the cock of the walk.
Don't look now: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-rumored-to-supply...
Private companies can be nice to their suppliers. Owners can choose to stay loyal to suppliers they went to high school with, even if it isn't the most cost-efficient.
I’m not saying you’re wrong but you’re previous paragraph sounding like you were wondering if it was the case vs. here you’re saying it’s known. Is this all true? Do they have a reputation for hammering their suppliers?
Apple has responded and has started moving a lot of manufacturing out of China. It just makes sense for risk management.
> China will remain the country of origin for the vast majority of total products sold outside the US, he added.
And international sales are a solid majority of Apple's revenue.
> Meanwhile, Vietnam will be the chief manufacturing hub "for almost all iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods product sold in the US".
> We do expect the majority of iPhones sold in US will have India as their country of origin," Mr Cook said.
Still not made in the US and no plan to change that. They will be selling products made in India/Vietnam domestically and products made in China internationally.
The tariffs are not bringing these jobs home.
Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.
Apple OTOH operates at consumer electronics price points. They need mature yields (>90%) to make the unit economics of an iPhone work. There's also the binning factor I am curious about. Nvidia can disable 10% of the cores on a defective GPU and sell it as a lower SKU. Does Apple have that same flexibility with a mobile SoC where the thermal or power envelope is so tightly coupled to the battery size?
For example the regular M4 can have 4 P-cores / 6 E-cores / 10 GPU cores, or 3/6/10 cores, or 4/4/8 cores, depending on the device.
They even do it on the smaller A-series chips - the A15 could be 2/4/5, 2/4/4, or 2/3/5.
For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads - and that’s after the node yields have been improved via the gazillion iPhone SoC dies.
NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards, but the VRAM situation is clearly making that less important, as they’re cutting some of those SKUs for being too vram heavy relative to MSRP.
If you want binning in action, the RTX ones other than the top ones, are it. Look for the A30 too, of which I was surprised there was no successor. Either they had better yields on Hopper or they didn't get enough from the A30...
As you cut SMs from a die you move from the 3090 down the stack, for instance. That’s yield management right there.
The Pro and Max chips are different dies, and the Ultra currently isn't even the same generation as the Max. And the iPads have never used any of those larger dies.
> NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards
NVIDIA's datacenter chips don't even have display outputs, and have little to no fixed-function graphics hardware (raster and raytracing units), and entirely different memory PHYs (none of NVIDIA's consumer cards have ever used HBM).
Not binning an M4 Max for an iPhone, but an M4 Pro with a few GPU or CPU cores disabled is clearly a thing.
Same for NVIDIA. The 4080 is a 4090 die with some SMs disabled.
The desktop 4090 uses the AD102 die, the laptop 4090 and desktop 4080 use the AD103 die, and the laptop 4080 uses the AD104 die. I'm not at all denying that binning is a thing, but you and other commenters are exaggerating the extent of it and underestimating how many separate dies are designed to span a wide product line like GPUs or Apple's computers/tablets/phones.
Otherwise, yes, if a chip doesn't make M4 Max, it can make M4 Pro. If not, M4. If not, A18 Pro. If not that, A18.
And even all of the above mentioned marketing names come in different core configurations. M4 Max can be 14 CPU Cores / 32 GPU cores, and it can also be 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.
So yeah, I'd agree that Apple has _extreme_ binning flexibility. It's likely also the reason why we got A19 / A19 Pro / M5 first, and we still don't have M5 Pro or M5 Max yet. Yields not high enough for M5 Max yet.
Unfortunately I don't think they bin down even lower (say, to S chips used in Apple Watches), but maybe in the future they will.
In retrospect, Apple ditching Intel was truly a gamechanging move. They didn't even have to troll everyone by putting an Intel i9 into a chassis that couldn't even cool an i7 to boost the comparison figures, but I guess they had to hedge their bet.
No, that's entirely wrong. All of those are different dies. The larger chips wouldn't even fit in phones, or most iPad motherboards, and I'm not sure a M4 Max or M4 Pro SoC package could even fit in a MacBook Air.
As a general rule, if you think a company might ever be selling a piece of silicon with more than half of it disabled, you're probably wrong and need to re-check your facts and assumptions.
There are two levels of Max Chip, but think of a Max as two pros on die (this is simplification, you can also think of as pro as being two normal cores tied together), so a bad max can't be binned into a pro. But a high-spec Max can be binned into a low-spec Max.
Like smartphones, AI chips also have a replacement cycle. AI chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go bad, but because the new ones are so much better in performance and efficiency than the previous generation. While smartphones aren't making huge leaps every year like they used to, AI chips still are -- meaning there's a stronger incentive to upgrade every cycle for these chips than smartphone processors.
I've heard that it's exactly that, reports of them burning out every 2-3 years. Haven't seen any hard numbers though.
They really, absolutely, are not.
It's not about "will there be a new hardware", it's about "is their order quantity predictable"
But also; Apple is one of the very few companies at their size that seems to have the political environment to make, and more importantly succeed, at decade investments. The iPhone wasn't an obvious success for 5 or 6 years. They started designing their own iPhone chips ~the iPhone 4 iirc, and pundits remarked: this isn't a good idea; today, the M5 in the iPad Pro outperforms every chip made by EVERYONE else in the world, by 25%, at a tenth the power draw and no active cooling (e.g. 9950X3D). Apple Maps (enough said). We're seeing similar investments today, things we could call "failures" that in 10 years we'll think were obviously going to be successful (cough vision pro).
The flat line prediction is now 2 years old...
Sure maybe they do better in some benchmarks, but to me the experience of using LLMs is and has been limited by their tendency to be confidently incorrect which betrays their illusion of intelligence as well as their usefulness. And I don't really see any clear path to getting past this hurdle, I think this may just be about as good as they're gonna get in that regard. Would be great if they prove me wrong.
If Nvidia pays more, Apple has to match.
Not a system that necessarily works all that well if one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the rest.
You can't let all your other customers die just because Nvidia is flush with cash this quarter...
Is the argument that Apple will go out of business? AAPL?
Wait,
> one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the rest.
I assure you, Apple has the long-term and short-term ability to spend like a drunken sailor all day and all night, indefinitely, and still not go out of business. Of course they’d prefer not to. But there is no ‘ability to pay’ gap here between these multi-trillion-dollar companies.
Apple will be forced to match or beat the offer coming from whoever is paying more. It will cost them a little bit of their hilariously-high margins. If they don’t, they’ll have to build less advanced chips or something. But their survival is not in doubt and TSMC knows that.
TSMC isn't running a charity, it sells capacity to the highest bidder.
Of course customers as big as Apple will have a relationship and insane volumes that they will be guaranteed important quotes regardless.
If it takes 4 years to build a new fab and Apple is willing to commit to paying pay the price of an entire fab, for chips to be delivered in 4 years time - why not take the order and build the capacity?
But Nvidia has also spent billions/year in TSMC for more than a decade and this just keeps increasing.
Well yeah, people were identifying that back when Apple bought out the entirety of the 5nm node for iPhones and e-tchotchkes. It was sorta implicitly assumed that any business that builds better hardware than Apple would boot them out overnight.
It's not "build better hardware" though, it's "continue to ship said hardware for X number of years". If someone buys out the entire fab capacity and then goes under next year, TSMC is left holding the bag
It really is about making better hardware. Apple would be out-bidding Nvidia right now, but only if the iPhone had equivalent value-add to Nvidia hardware. Alas, iPhones are overpriced and underpowered, most people will agree.
That's the take I would pursue if I were Apple.
A quiet threat of "We buy wafers on consumer demand curves. You’re selling them on venture capital and hype"
The reality is that TSMC has no competition capable of shipping an equivalent product. If AI fizzles out completely, the only way Apple can choose to not use TSMC is if they decide to ship an inferior product.
A world where TSMC drains all the venture capital out of all the AI startups, using NVidia as an intermediary, and then all the bubble pops and they all go under is a perfectly happy place for TSMC. In these market conditions they are asking cash upfront. The worst that can happen is that they overbuild capacity using other people's money that they don't have to pay back, leaving them in an even more dominant position in the crash that follows.
Business is a little more nuanced than this audience thinks, and it’s silly to think Apple has no leverage.
From TSMC's perspective, Apple is the one that needs financial assistance. If they wanted the wafers more than Nvidia, they'd be paying more. But they don't.
This is the "venture capital and hype" being referred to, not Nvidia themselves.
That line is purified cope.
I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.
The giant conglomerates in Asia seem more able to do it.
Google has somewhat tried but then famously kills most everything even things that could be successful if smaller businesses.
Every time a CEO or company board says "focus," an interesting product line loses its wings.
I think Asian companies are much less dependent on public markets and have as strong private control (chaebols in South Korea for example - Samsung, LG, Hyundai etc).
If you look at US companies that are under "family control" you might see a similar sprawl, like Cargill, Koch, I'd even put Berkshire in this class even though it's not "family controlled" in the literal sense, it's still associated with two men and not a professional CEO.
And ironically Apple acts like being a small contender the moment they feel some heat after a decade of relatively easy wins everywhere it seemed.
So finally there is a company that gives Apple some much needed heat.
That’s why I in absolute terms side with NVIDIA, the small contender in this case.
PS: I had one key moment in my career when I was at Google and a speaker mentioned the unit “NBU”. It stands for next billion units.
This is ten years ago and started my mental journey into large scale manufacturing and production including all the processes included.
The fascination never left. It was a mind bender for me and totally get why people miss everything that large.
At Google it was just a milestone expected to be hit - not one time but as the word next indicates multiple times.
Mind blowing and eye opening to me ever since. Fantastic inspiration thinking about software, development and marketing.
So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on some guy's substack.
How do you think it got in the LLM training set in the first place?
AFAIK only Apple has been commiting to wafers up to 3 years in the future. It would be a crazy bet for NVidia to do the same, as they don't know how big will be the business.
That would ruin TSMC and others' independence.
Nvidia already did buy Intel shares so it is a thing.
Nvidia did discuss with TSMC for more capacity many times. It's not about financing or minimum purchasing agreements. TSMC played along during COVID and got hit.
As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.
Which barely impacts TSMC. Most of their revenue and focus is on the advanced nodes - not the mature 1s.
> As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.
When did I imply there was a demand dip? I said they built out too much capacity.
https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/intel-layoffs-25-perc...
> Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors
In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
Apple can and should do it again!
mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of modern governments...
(I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card from Jenson Huang).
I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.
The 2027 date was a guideline for their military to be "ready", which they may not be either. That is a far cry from the decision to actually make a move. They will only do that if they're certain it will work out for them, and as things stand, it is very risky for Xi.
The most advanced ASML machines also cost something like $300-400M each and I am willing to bet if configured wrong can heavily damage themselves and the building they are in.
Buy in-demand fab output today, even at a premium price and even if you can't install or power it all, expecting shortages tomorrow. Which is pretty much the way the tech economy is already working.
So no, no hedge. NVIDIA's customers already beat you to it.
I know about the existence of the initiative but I don't know how it is progressing / what is actually going on on that front.
There's ~a dozen in the works or under construction
TMSC plans to have 2-3nm fabs operational in the next 2-3 years
So we're 2-3 years behind the standard (currently 2nm), and further behind on the bleeding edge sub-2nm fabs
Then the essential skilled personnel can’t come train people because the visa process was created by and is operated by the equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities. Sometimes companies say fuck it we’re doing it anyway and then ice raids their facility and shuts it down.
I’d post the news articles about th above, but your googling thumbs work as well as mine.
NVidia gets the capacity because they're willing to pay more. If Apple wants to, they can pay more to get it back.
Any other time and place? The power to run it, plus the power to cool it.
What kind of experiments are you doing? Did you try out exo with a dgx doing prefill and the mac doing decode?
I'm also totally interested in hearing what you have learned working with all this gear. Did you buy all this stuff out of pocket to work with?
That you are writing AI agents for a living is fascinating to hear. We aren't even really looking at how to use agents internally yet. I think local agents are incredibly off the radar at my org despite some really good additions as supplement resources for internal apps.
What's deployment look like for your agents? You're clearly exploring a lot of different approaches . . .
Just look at what people are actually using. Don't rely on a few people who tested a few short prompts with short completions.
Or they could buy out Intel and sell off their cpu design division
At this point it would be corporate suicide if they were not outlining a strategy to own their own fab(s).
Apple has less cash available than TSMC plans to burn this year. TSMC is not spending 50 billion dollars just because it's fun to do so. This is how much it takes just to keep the wheels on the already existing bus. Starting from zero is a non-starter. It just cannot happen anymore. So, no one in their right mind would sell Apple their leading edge foundry at a discount either.
There was a time when companies like Apple could have done this. That time was 15+ years ago. It's way too late now.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/tsmc-ends-2025-with-a-...
I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be values by customers?
You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.
As would almost innumerable others.
We really need many more smaller, more independent manufacturers. All the big guns, from NVIDIA, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc... have massively disappointed about 99.9% of us here now.
Also Nvidia's margins are higher which means that they will be willing to pay a higher unit price.
This seems like an open and closed case from TSMC's side.
More likely they will not use leading the leading edge fab process, which TBH is fine for the vast majority.
I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.
I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM.
I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..
The only reason that Thunderbolt exists is to expose DMA over an artificial PCI channel. I'd hope they've made progress on it, Thunderbolt has only been around for fourteen years after all.
I’m not saying this is bad or anything, it’s just another iteration of the centralized vs decentralized pendulum swing that has been happening in tech since the beginning (mainframes with dumb terminals, desktops, the cloud, mobile) etc.
Apple might experience a slowdown in hardware sales because of it. Nvidia might experience a sales boom because of it. The future could very well bring a swing back. Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)
You don't have to imagine. You can, today, with a few (major) caveats: you'll only match Claude from roughly ~6 months ago (open-weight models roughly lag behind the frontier by ~half a year), and you'd need to buy a couple of RTX 6000 Pros (each one is ~$10k).
Technically you could also do this with Macs (due to their unified RAM), but the speed won't be great so it'd be unusable.
I wish I were in that situation, but I find myself able to use lots more compute than I have. And it seems like many others feel the same.
They would benefit in what way?
Because their government seems to benefit a lot from Taiwan existing and being an enemy.
If or when China’s economic and/or demographics issues become problematic is exactly when the CCP likely would want to strike. At least seems to me like it’d be a good time to foment national pride.
Of course hopefully I’m wrong and you’re right.
Many of these larger geopolitical things are decades in the making. Even Trump’s Venezuela action has been a long time brewing. So much so that “US troops in Venezuela” has become a trope in military sci-fi. The primary change with Trump is how he presents and/or justifies it, or rather doesn’t.
It will likely be a naval plus air blockade to force a political solution to avoid the messiness of an invasion, but time is on China's side there.
Long term: demographics are worsening for China relative to now or 5 years ago.
Short term: China doesn’t yet have viable homegrown replacements for ASML, TSMC, etc.
Really short term: China blockading Taiwan and suffering the economic fallout would be much more painful than US blockading Cuba/Venezuela/etc.
A decisive kinetic action or a very soft political action, rather than a blockade seems more viable in the current state.
It’s very possible that they will be able to dominate South China Sea and their zone of the Pacific, even now, given the proximity advantages and ship/missile production; and I think that would be satisfactory to them.
20 years from now, China’s sphere and America’s sphere are separate, with China having a lead in competing for Africa, and Europe in a very weird place socially, economically, demographically, and WRT Russia/US competition.
I'm not like, rooting for this, I'm just trying to be realistic.
The US has an embargo that doesn't impact other countries that want to trade with Cuba. China is going to put an actual cordon around Taiwan.
Also, the US has no historical reason for claiming Cuba and has no real domestic pressure to do so (nobody in either party is asking for it). China has been very clear they see Taiwan as a part of China and will reunite with it not for economic or strategic reasons, but for nationalistic ones.
What options do you suppose the military might be working on? Training to surround, and blockade? (Check) Information warfare? (Check) Building high numbers of landing craft? (Check) Building high numbers of modular weapon systems that can rapidly increase the number of offensive ships? (Check) Building numerous high volume drone warfare ships and airborne launchers? (Check)
Keep in mind that there are public language cues that preceded invasion such as declarations of the invalidity of the other country’s sovereignty, declarations that the other country is already part of the invading country. Have you seen any signs of that?
Your persistent doubts require ignorance of strong evidence.
The US can't even remotely come close to stopping China in its own backyard today, in another 5-10 years they'll just have that much larger of a Navy. The US knows that's the situation. The US can supply a large one week bombing campaign against China and that's it, based on inventory levels. The US will exhaust its cruise missile supply instantly and the US has almost no meaningful drone-bomb supply. China can build cheap missiles by the tens of thousands perpetually, train them to the coast, and flatten Taiwan and any opponents as necessary. China is the only country that can sustain a multi-year WW2 style bombing campaign today, thanks to its manufacturing capabilities. Imagine them on a full war footing.
China absorbing Taiwan (especially to Americans) just doesn’t seem like a radical, terrifying concept.
A Hong Kong style negotiated transfer might be best for the world - Taiwanese that want to leave can, the US can build up a parallel source of semiconductors, China gets Taiwan without firing a shot.
USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the US mainland for a long time now. 30% of all 2nm and better technologies are slated to be produced in Arizona by 2030.
The real loser in all of this will be the EU which will be completely without the ability to produce or acquire chips. They'll just end up buying from China and USA, which will only further deepen their dependence on those countries.
Compare to TSMC's Arizona project, which will supply 30% of TSMC's 2nm and smaller process output. Already just one of the six planned TSMC fabs in Arizona is pumping out ~30k WSPMs at 5nm or smaller.
And that doesn't even get into CoWoS packaging, which is essential for all the highest-performance and highest-margin parts.
The fact is: In semiconductors, Europe is getting left in the dust. Sure they can fab some mature node chips for industrial uses--and that's not nothing--but Smartphone SoCs, "AI" accelerators, DRAM, even boring CPUs simply cannot be made any more in Europe, and to the limited extent that they can, they will be horrendously uncompetitive on the market and outclassed in every performance metric by Chinese and American chips.
EU is on a big sovereignty kick right now, which makes sense given that their foreign dependencies keep blowing up in their faces. So it's strange that EU is so complacent about their foreign dependency on advanced node semiconductors.
It’s too old, too complacent, and too broke. Even compared to the US and our level of discord, there’s no unity across divisions.
The US absurdly threatens Greenland, but Denmark/EU’s response is “Sanction US tech or kick out US military bases on Europe”, rather than be able to rattle a saber back and show some credible backbone.
They sent warships to Greenland. What level of saber rattling do you expect?
Is it supposed to work independently of other technology at some point?
Then anyways: multilateral cooperation is at the heart of scientific progress anyways. It's fitting that ASML is in a country that is culturally strongly influenced by its history of seafaring and trade. Will see how the braindrain caused by people not wanting to live their lifes in a society taht doesn't share values like these will influence that whole technological armsrace thing.
Some people in Japan are coming up with a successor to EUV as far as I remember, what was their name again?
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoimprint-lithography [2] https://www.rapidus.inc/en/
My conspiracy theory is that there is some kind of "gentleman agreement" on this topic between the US and China.
As soon as Taiwan is not needed anymore by the US for chip fabrication, the US will at the very least loose their grip on it.
Note to commenters: that's my theory, does not mean I endorse it in any way.
So now Apple, Nvidia, AMD (possibly), and most car manufacturers will be up a creek without a paddle when China invades in 1-2 years. That is unless China's Xi is bluffing to mollify domestic war hawks and reunification zealots by going through the motions of building an army of war machines without intent to use them, but I don't think that's probable. It's possible that Trump already made agreements with Xi to cede "Oceania" if they allow the US to take Greenland and South America for empire-building neocolonialism.
I mean this is pretty fantastic.
Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally didn’t sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop, desktop, and server chip market.
Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip fabricator, but there’s no guarantee it would be as good as TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an ability to sell capacity to other customers.
At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and outbid Nvidia for priority.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/22/apple-chips-to-be...
Apple's investing heavily in the TSMC fab in Arizona, due to open in 2027, to have 3nm capabilities for its flagship chips, but it's unlikely that would ever cover a majority of that chipmaking.
https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-arizona-...
https://wccftech.com/tsmc-plans-to-bring-3nm-production-to-t...
(Apple is well known for shoving "lesser vendors" out of the way at TSMC)
How is owning a larger share of a company with proportionally less cash and a higher price per share than what you could have sold it for before bad.
Have you looked at precious metal charts as of late? Do 1/x and that's the value of the cash these companies are trading for a valuable business.
Apple:
2023 A16, A17 Pro, M2, M3 ~330M ~135 ~4,455M
2024 A17 Pro, A18, M3, M4 ~350M ~150 ~5,250M
2025 A18, A19 (pre-launch), M4 ~415M ~200 ~8,300M
NV:
2023 Ada (RTX 40), Hopper ~60M ~280 ~1,680M
2024 Hopper (H100), Blackwell ~85M ~450 ~3,825M
2025 Blackwell (B200), Rubin ~105M ~775 ~8,135M