NVIDIA was on everyone’s lips last month when its market value exceeded a trillion dollarsThanks to the current megatrends in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High Performance Computing (HPC), there is another company that not only reaps a huge benefit from these trends in AI and HPCbut also has dominance over the manufacturing of AI processors.
that company is TSMC, which produces some of the most complex processors for AI and HPC ever built, including those of NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Tenstorrent, Brains and Graphcore (just to name a few). NVIDIA’s A100 and H100 GPUs (as well as their A800 and H800 derivatives for the Chinese market), the most popular compute GPUs used for HPC and AI workloads, are manufactured at TSMC, as are EPYC CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. AMD Instinct GPUs. AI and HPC startups like Tenstorrent, and developers like Cerebras also chose TSMC for your products.
While TSMC doesn’t disclose how much it makes from selling CPUs, GPUs, and specialized processors or SoCs for AI, data centers, HPCs, and servers, these products use a lot of silicon, so TSMC likely makes tens of billions making those products. For your customers. For example, NVIDIA’s GH100 compute GPU has a die size of 814mm2, while AMD’s EPYC Genoa uses 12 Zen 4-based CCD chipsets, each measuring around 72mm2 and thus Therefore, it uses 864 mm2 of N5 silicon.
Artificial Intelligence chip production is dominated by TSMC.
While we don’t have revenue splits for TSMC rivals such as Samsung Foundry and GlobalFoundries, as these companies lag far behind the Taiwanese chipmaker, it’s safe to say that TSMC benefits from AI and HPC in general. In particular, it dominates AI GPU shipments, making them for both NVIDIA (controlling more than 90% of shipments) as for AMD (which controls less than 10%).
Automotive, Internet of Things (IoT), Smartphones, DCE, High Performance Computing (HPC) and others. These categories encompass any type of chip that is manufactured at TSMC facilities. Regardless of whether a chip perfectly fits any of the definitions, segmentation based on production is done this way, primarily to control revenue and margins.
There are peculiarities such as Apple CPUs that fall into the HPC category, for example, so the numbers that we will see must be considered with that perspective. Continuing with the example of HPC, this division provided the company with 30% of its income, equivalent to 10,389 million dollars in 2019. These figures have been increasing, since in 2020 it had an increase of 33%, in 2021 of 37% and in 2022 42%.
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Estimates for 2023 suggest that revenue will increase by 50% of the company’s total revenue for the reasons mentioned above. If we consider that on top of this, as we saw recently, the company continues to increase its global chip market share, easily surpassing 60% and expected to reach around 65% sometime in 2023, It can be said that AI and HPC are filling the coffers of this Taiwanese firm with gold.
That being said, starting this year its main competitor will be Intel, which opens its doors after its IDM 2.0 strategy with IFS and MTD, where the foundry system is very similar to that of TSMC. Could Intel be the differentiating factor that breaks, at least, the chip monopoly?
Fountain: Digitimes
