TSMC posts sixth straight record quarterly profit on AI demand
Net profit up 68.7 percent at 23.6 billion euros as revenue climbs past 46 billion euros, the company that makes the chips inside Nvidia's processors still closed lower
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Taiwan chip giant TSMC says net profit hit record in third quarter
euronews.com
TSMC, the world's biggest contract maker of microchips, posted a net profit of NT$763.1 billion (€23.6 billion) for the July-to-September quarter on Thursday — up 68.7 per cent year-on-year and a record for the sixth consecutive quarter. Revenue rose 50.9 per cent to NT$1.5 trillion (€46.4 billion), ahead of analyst estimates of NT$739.5 billion and comfortably past the previous record of NT$706.6 billion, set only in the April-to-June quarter.
The company attributed the result to global demand for AI hardware. That demand has carried Nvidia and AMD past trillion-dollar valuations on data-centre processors neither of them manufactures: the chips are made on TSMC's lines in Hsinchu, and the manufacturer's share of a boom measured in trillions of market value is a quarterly profit of €23.6 billion.
The market's response to the sixth straight record was to sell. TSMC shares fell 2.2 per cent ahead of the earnings release and remained lower after it. A company that has now broken its own profit record six quarters in a row could not get its shares into the black on the news.
The relationship at the centre of the boom has a history worth recalling. Jensen Huang has traced Nvidia's 30-year partnership with TSMC to a letter he wrote to founder Morris Chang — and to a period when Nvidia's chief executive could not get the foundry to return his calls. The call that came through was from Chang himself.
Nvidia's AI data-centre processors are produced today by one company on one island, and each record quarter registers where the boom's scarce asset actually sits. TSMC has delivered six of them in a row; on the day the sixth was announced, its shares closed lower.