2 months ago
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Nvidia just took the top spot from Apple at TSMC, the biggest chip foundry on the planet. It finally happened. After years of trailing behind, Nvidia now spends more money than any other company at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Jensen Huang, the guy running Nvidia, said it himself on a podcast this month. He told Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, decades ago that this day would come. Now he’s saying, “Morris will be happy to know Nvidia is TSMC’s largest customer now.”
Back when that conversation happened, no one expected this. Apple had been king of the chip world for a long time. They relied on TSMC to make chips for iPhones and Macs.
Those A-series and M-series processors were what kept Apple in front. But now things have changed, and Nvidia is the one piling up the orders.
Nvidia’s spending now beats Apple’s by billions
Ben Bajarin, who analyzes tech at Creative Strategies, said Nvidia is set to bring in $33 billion in revenue for TSMC this year. That’s about 22% of the foundry’s total. Apple, on the other hand, is expected to bring in just $27 billion, or around 18%. “The scale of this drastically changed,” Ben said. “A couple years ago, you could just see how much more capacity Nvidia was demanding from TSMC.”
TSMC doesn’t rank its 522 customers in public, but it did admit back in March that one customer brought in 22% of its revenue and the second biggest brought in 12%. That was the first big hint that Nvidia had taken the lead.
This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, demand for AI chips exploded. Nvidia’s chips are now used in tons of data centers. The company is behind most of the AI accelerators out there, and that demand pushed TSMC’s high-performance computing sales up to 55% of revenue in the last quarter. In 2022, that number was 40%.
Nvidia’s chips cost more and demand more
Part of why Nvidia now dominates is that its chips are huge and complicated to make. Compared to what Apple makes, Nvidia’s hardware takes more time, more effort, and more money. That alone boosts how much TSMC earns from them.
In February, Nvidia is expected to report $213 billion in sales for fiscal 2026, which ends this month. That’s a 66% increase. Meanwhile, Apple’s sales for fiscal 2025, which ended in September, only grew by 6.4%.
Apple’s still pushing though. They’re reporting earnings this Thursday and expecting 12% revenue growth. Samik Chatterjee from JPMorgan raised his price target on Apple to $315, saying the stock could still rise 27%. He pointed to stronger iPhone 17 demand and lower expenses. Apple stock is up 11% over the past year, but still behind the S&P 500, which gained 13.4% in that time.
Samik said memory prices have been hurting Apple’s profit margins, but he expects that pressure to ease. He also said the company’s Services revenue could rise 7%, even though that’s less than the 14% Apple aimed for. Still, he thinks they’ve got other ways to grow.
TSMC is still the most dominant foundry out there. They work with almost everyone; AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and more. Research group TrendForce said TSMC owns 70% of the global chip manufacturing market.
Intel, trying to play catch-up, wants to make advanced chips in the U.S. But they still don’t have a lead customer. Their stock dropped 13% on Thursday after giving weak production forecasts.
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