TSMC’s quarterly revenue rises due to demand for hpc and automotive chips

Taiwanese chip maker TSMC has shared its full quarterly results. The company’s profit in that quarter rose by 45.1 percent to approximately 1.425 billion euros. According to the company, this was due to ‘the increasing demand for hpc and automotive chips’.

TSMC already released its quarterly results earlier this month, but is now sharing more details with its shareholders. In a presentation The company says, among other things, that half of its sales in the past quarter again came from its 7nm and 5nm processes. Those nodes accounted for 30 and 20 percent of the revenue, respectively.

TSMC’s 7nm process is used in recent AMD products, such as AMD’s Ryzen CPUs and the socs in the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S. 5nm is now being used in smartphone chips, for example from Apple. Later this year, the first AMD CPUs based on 5nm should appear on the market.

For total sales, smartphones contributed to 40 percent of sales, up 1 percent from a quarter earlier. The largest revenue growth was seen in hpc chips. They accounted for 41 percent last quarter. That is an increase of 26 percent compared to the previous quarter. Hpc chips are used, for example, for servers, data centers and supercomputers. Automotive recorded the same 26 percent sales growth rate, although such chips accounted for 5 percent of sales in total.

Nevertheless, this contributed to the turnover growth of 35.5 percent compared to the same period in 2021. Wendell Huang, CFO at TSMC, expects that growth to continue. “In the second quarter of 2022, we expect our business to continue to be supported by hpc and automotive-related demand, partially offset by the seasonality of smartphones.”

In a conference call with shareholders TSMC further emphasizes that production on its new N3 process will start in the second half of this year. This 3nm node will be the company’s last process based on the more traditional finfet transistors. From 2nm, the company is switching to gate-all-around transistors. The company says it sees “a lot of customer engagement” in 3nm and expects more tape outs at 3nm for its first year of production compared to the 5nm launch year. Next year, TSMC will release N3E, an improved version of its first 3nm node.