- The world's largest chip foundry, TSMC, announced a 36% year-on-year increase in second-quarter revenue, reaching NT$1.270 trillion, approximately $39.63 billion. This growth is primarily driven by the massive demand for advanced chips brought about by artificial intelligence applications.
- Due to the disruption caused by Typhoon Bavi, the June revenue data, originally scheduled for release last Friday, was postponed to Monday after the market closed. The data shows that June's single-month revenue surged nearly 68% year-on-year, reaching NT$442.68 billion, setting a new historical monthly high.
- This better-than-expected financial performance was released a few days before TSMC's official second-quarter earnings conference. As the exclusive or core supplier to global tech giants like NVIDIA and Apple, TSMC's forward-looking performance guidance is seen as an absolute barometer of the global semiconductor market.
Computing Power Dividend Supports High-Frequency Data Explosion
Preliminary data from the second-quarter earnings report shows that TSMC's capacity utilization in advanced packaging and 3nm and 5nm advanced processes remains fully loaded. With the gradual increase in shipments of NVIDIA's (NVDA:US) new architecture chips, TSMC, as its core foundry, directly benefits from the AI hardware infrastructure dividend. June's single-month revenue rose again by 6.2% month-on-month, indicating that the momentum of large customers' additional orders has not diminished, and the market's earlier concerns about the delayed recovery of consumer electronics have been completely offset by the strong explosion of computing power demand.
Supply Chain Capacity Faces Marginal Turning Point
Due to geopolitical factors and the global supply chain's reorganization, TSMC faces the pressure of cost depreciation in the early stages of overseas wafer plant production. However, in terms of revenue density, its cumulative revenue in the first half of the year has reached NT$2.40 trillion, with a year-on-year growth rate of 35.6%, indicating that the company has successfully passed on some costs downstream through technology premiums and CoWoS packaging price increases. If the supply-demand gap for AI server chips cannot be bridged in the short term, TSMC's marginal advantage in pricing power will further expand.
Major Banks Raise Pricing and Risk Appetite Reassessment
Following the release of favorable data delayed by the typhoon, the valuation center of global tech stocks received strong support. On Monday, before the U.S. stock market opened, the implied volatility of TSMC (TSM:US) and the Taiwan local market (2330:TW) options showed some divergence. Foreign institutions generally expect TSMC to raise its full-year dollar revenue guidance at the upcoming earnings conference. If the management releases a more aggressive capital expenditure plan, the market's risk appetite for the semiconductor equipment sector and the entire AI industry chain will undergo a new round of reassessment.
Forward-Looking Performance Outlook Becomes Global Indicator
The market's core focus has now completely shifted to the second-quarter earnings briefing to be held this Thursday. Investors will closely watch the gross margin dilution of the 3nm process and the profitability timeline of new overseas plants. Against the backdrop of limited supply elasticity in the industry's advanced processes, TSMC's guidance for the next few quarters not only concerns its own valuation logic but will also determine the duration and height of the global semiconductor industry's cycle peak.
