The price of TSMC’s 3nm wafers is being revealed. The manufacturer is going to raise the price per wafer by 25% over those of 5nm. This will affect the price of upcoming CPUs and GPUs.
TSMC: 3nm wafer prices rise, more expensive CPUs and GPUs coming
According to DigiTimes, there is coming an increase in the price of the 3nm wafers that TSMC is going to manufacture in its facilities, and which are used by some of the major manufacturers such as AMD or Nvidia.
According to this media, each wafer manufactured in 3nm from TSMC is going to cost about $20,000. The price increase is 25% per wafer with respect to those wafers manufactured with a 5nm node technology.
In the attached graph you can see how TSMC has been increasing the price of the wafers as the process nodes are improved. This 25% increase could drive up the value of processors and graphics cards using this node. We understand that future RX 8000 and RTX 50 series and Ryzen 8000 CPUs are going to use this node and that prices are going to go up. See the cost of wafers from 7nm to 5nm went up by 60%.
The price increase will not only affect Nvidia or AMD products, it will also affect Apple products, which also use TSMC technology, such as the iPhone, iPad, and iMac computers with M CPUs.
”However, this dominant situation will also allow the price of each generation of wafer foundries to increase significantly without any resistance. It is understood that 3nm has already surpassed $20,000 US dollars. With the sharp increase in production costs, the chip industry is bound to pass it on to customers and end consumers, and the price of new terminal products will no longer retreat.
[…] NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said bluntly that despite the limited performance improvement, the increase in new products is reasonable because the price of 12-inch die cast wafers has increased significantly compared to the past, not just a little more expensive.”
via DigiTimes
TSMC is currently the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer.