AMD becomes TSMC's third largest customer
Apple 25.93% MediaTek 5.80% AMD 4.36% Qualcomm 3.90% Broadcom 3.77% Nvidia 2.83% Sony 2.54% Marvell 1.39% STMicroelectronics 1.38% Analog Devices 1 , 06% Intel 0.84% These numbers are based on Bloomberg and DigiTimes estimates, released by DigiTimes.
After relying on GlobalFoundries and TSMC for years, AMD has begun to relocate manufacturing of its more advanced at TSMC in 2018, after GlobalFoundries pulled the plug on its cutting-edge process technologies. Nowadays TSMC manufactures all of AMD's advanced CPUs, GPUs and SoCs using N7 and N6 process technologies, which is why the chip developer's contribution to the foundry's revenue is growing along with its sales. Conversely, a number of TSMC customers, such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm, have moved many of their orders to Samsung Foundry, which is why their contribution is decreasing. As of December 2021, Apple, TSMC's largest customer, contributed 25.93% of the foundry's revenue, mainly because the company uses TSMC's newest, most advanced and most expensive N5 and N5P nodes for hundreds of millions of its chips. MediaTek was second with 5.80%, while AMD was in third place, contributing 4.39% of the foundry's earnings.
AMD's share of TSMC's balance sheet is set to grow as the company increases adoption of the foundry's advanced packaging technologies and embraces the more expensive N5 for its upcoming Zen 4-based processors Also, once AMD absorbs Xilinx, it will be a considerably larger semiconductor company overall and therefore will use more services than TSMC. NVIDIA, which was traditionally a major customer of TSMC and who also co-designed a custom node for its GPUs several years ago, now accounts for 2.83% of the foundry's revenue. Interestingly, the transfer of Ampere client GPU orders to Samsung Foundry has put NVIDIA significantly behind Broadcom and Qualcomm in TSMC's revenue share.
NVIDIA obviously produces more chips large and expensive of the two telecommunications giants. But most of the GPUs made by the world's largest contract chip maker are made using 12FFN process technology. TSMC is also responsible for the A100 Compute GPUs for data centers and high-performance computers, but the number of such chips produced in TSMC's N7 node is relatively limited. This will change when / if NVIDIA transfers production of its Ada Lovelace and Hopper-based GPUs to TSMC, but for now the company is the foundry's sixth customer.
One of the most mysterious things related to TSMC's future is Intel's contribution to revenue once it begins shipping high-volume CPUs to the Santa Clara company. Currently, TSMC manufactures a variety of components for Intel, many of which use less state-of-the-art nodes, while the Compute Tiles for the next Ponte Vecchio GPU aren't exactly high-volume products. Bloomberg and DigiTimes estimated Intel's input to TSMC's revenue as of December 2021 was around 0.84%. However, once Intel starts using TSMC's N3 technology (which remains only a rumor for now) in 2022 and 2023, its contribution could skyrocket to TSMC's Top 3 customer.
