On December 28, TSMC announced that it will invest NT$800-1000 billion (about 184-230 billion yuan) to expand the Zhongke Factory, covering an area of about 100 hectares. In addition to the construction of a new 2nm plant in Zhongke, TSMC will also have a follow-up 1nm plant here.
TSMC Zhongke Factory currently covers cash processes such as 28nm and 7nm, and the number of employees has reached more than 8,000. It is planned to complete the land acquisition and environmental impact assessment work next year, start construction in 2023, and officially put into production in 2025.
TSMC this time will be 2nm, 1nm new plant in the Zhongke factory is still quite surprising, TSMC chairman Liu Deyin once said that he hopes to balance the layout in the north, central and south of Taiwan Province of China, with production capacity accounting for one-third, if the Hsinchu 2nm base is not enough, it may be possible to put production capacity in Taichung. Therefore, the placement of the 2nm base in Zhongke this time is a bit unexpected.
Earlier this month, research firm TrendForce released a report that chip foundry revenue in the third quarter of 2021 increased by 12% month-on-month due to the peak season, new capacity and price increases.
Among them, TSMC is an absolute brother, occupying 53.1% of the market share, and Samsung occupies 17.1%, ranking second. UMC, GlobalFoundries, and SMIC ranked third, fourth, and fifth, with a market share of about 6%, a big gap from the top two.
TSMC revenue increased 11.9% sequentially to $14.88 billion, primarily due to the release of the iPhone 13. Taiwan's Economic Daily reported that Apple's order volume for TSMC's A15 chip this year exceeded 100 million, which shows that Apple is very optimistic about the sales of the iPhone 13.
Xiao Lei analyzed from the TSMC process node that due to the continuous demand for smartphone chips and HPC (high performance computing) chips, the total revenue share of 7nm and 5nm nodes has exceeded 50% and is still expanding. 5nm and the latest 4nm, a large part of it is occupied by Apple. In addition, Apple AirPods Pro uses H1 chips, built using a 7nm process, AirPods Pro is one of Apple's most popular accessories, and the shipment of H1 chips is also very high.
Although TSMC temporarily occupies a leading position, Intel and Samsung are looking at the tiger in the back, and it is necessary for TSMC to actively develop advanced processes in order to keep large customers such as Apple. It can be expected that TSMC will continue to accelerate the production of advanced processes. Moreover, TSMC's current market value is as high as $636.3 billion, and there is no shortage of money to expand the scale.