TSMC, the world’s largest foundry is dependent more than ever on US chipmakers, and vice versa. In 2021, the Taiwanese foundry earned NT$1.01 trillion from its US clients, with Apple and AMD accounting for more than 36% of its overall revenue share. That’s an increase of 24% in yearly revenue compared to the previous fiscal year and an increase to 64% in US chipmakers’ share.
Apple was unsurprisingly the largest contributor to this figure, accounting for more than a quarter of TSMC’s overall revenue in 2021. The Cupertino giant contributed an incredible NT$405.402 billion to the leading foundry’s revenue, an increase of 20.37% over the previous year.
With Huawei more or less out of the picture, AMD has stepped up to become TSMC’s second-largest customer. The x86 IC company contributed NT$153.74 billion to TSMC’s revenue in 2021, accounting for more than 10% of its overall earnings for the first time ever. It’s worth noting that AMD’s entire portfolio was fabbed on TSMC’s N7 process, with a few lineups leveraging the N6 node as well. The chipmaker is all set to migrate to the N5 process later this year on both the CPU and GPU fronts simultaneously.
AMD is set to announce the Ryzen 7000 processors sometime in the third quarter of the year, with a launch planned for either late Q3 or Q4. The Radeon RX 7000 GPUs which are said to leverage a chiplet (modular) design are also slated for a late 2022 release. In addition to the N5 process, the lower-end SKUs are reportedly going to use the N6 node as well.
N6= 6nm, N5= 5nm.
