Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) secured a 64 percent share of the global pure play foundry business in the third quarter of last year, up from 62 percent a quarter earlier, further cementing the company’s lead over its peers, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research.
In a report issued on Nov. 26 last year, Counterpoint said the better than expected market share enjoyed by TSMC was bolstered by high utilization rates in its advanced 5 nanometer and 3nm processes and also fueled by strong global artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator demand and smartphone sales.
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co came in second with a 12 percent share of the global market, on the back of an increase in shipments of chips made on its 4nm and 5nm processes.
Photo: CNA
It was followed by China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), which secured 6 percent taking advantage of solid demand for mature processes such as the 28nm process.
United Microelectronics Corp (聯電), another contract chipmaker in Taiwan, tied with US-based GlobalFoundries Inc to take a 5 percent share in the third quarter, in the wake of stable demand in the Internet of Things and communications infrastructure markets, Counterpoints said.
Counterpoint also said that the 3nm process rose to second place in the third quarter by taking a 13 percent share of the global market.
It replaced 7/6nm technology (11 percent) on the back of the full utilization of TSMC’s 3nm production capacity, as production by US-based consumer electronics giant Apple Inc, American smartphone IC designer Qualcomm Inc, US chipmaker Intel Corp and Taiwan’s smartphone IC designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) gained momentum.
The 5/4nm process took first place in the global market by securing 24 percent of the market in the third quarter, driven by strong AI demand, including American AI chip designer Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell graphics processing units, Counterpoint said.
TSMC is prepared to start commercial production of the more sophisticated 2nm process at its fab in Hsinchu County’s Baoshan Township (寶山) later this year, making the plant the chipmaker’s first fab to roll out chips made on that particular technology.
Local media reported yesterday that another TSMC 2nm fab located in Kaohsiung will start a trial run later this month, though the company declined to comment on the report ahead of an investor conference slated for Thursday.
The 2nm process will be 10-15 percent faster than the current N3E, an enhanced version of the 3nm process, and consume less power. In addition, density will also be more than 15 percent higher.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS