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TSMC Will Have An AI Business Bigger Than All Of Intel Foundry
Everyone is in a big hurry to get the latest and greatest GPU accelerators to build generative AI platforms. Those who can’t get GPUs, or have custom
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TSMC has been very clear that the N3 node will be a very important volume product for a long time, and it is interesting that Nvidia chose to not use it when Apple did for its smartphone chips and both AMD and Intel are going to with their future CPUs. Apple is reportedly eating all of TSMC’s N3 capacity for its homegrown, Arm-based smartphone and Mac PC processors. It looks to us like Nvidia is hanging back on the N3 process as Apple helps TSMC work out the kinks in this somewhat troublesome 3 nanometer process, and we assume that Apple will also be in the driver’s seat with TSMC’s N2 2 nanometer nanosheet transistor process, which will be seeing real competition from a credible 18A process from Intel Foundry in 2025. But TSMC has been clear that it think its enhanced 3 nanometer process, called N3P, will be able to go up against Intel’s 18A.
The rumor is that most of the $15 billion in advanced bookings over many years that Intel Foundry has on the books are for Arm server chips and AI training and inference chips that Microsoft is building for its own use and for that of partner OpenAI. And with national security flag waving as well as the practicalities of needing a second source for chip suppliers among all chip designers, we think that Intel might be low-balling its aspirations of having $15 billion a year in external foundry revenues by 2030, and we can see the internal Intel product groups for chips in PCs and servers to drive maybe $25 billion in additional foundry revenues. That’s $40 billion, and who knows how profitable Intel Foundry will be.