While Coronavirus is driving the business world into a stalemate, NVIDIA and AMD have stepped in and bought the excess capacity from TSMC to increase their orders for state-of-the-art GPUs and CPUs.
NVIDIA and AMD have bought up TSMC’s excess capacity from 7nm node
In a report released by Digitimes, Taiwan’s most trusted news source, TSMC is expected to do well in the first half of 2020 because of a sudden increase in orders from NVIDIA and AMD, which are expected to catch up.
The latest rollout from NVIDIA was in September 2018, and it’s been a long time since NVIDIA unveiled a successor, and we believe that the company has been waiting for TSMC’s 7nm node to mature into high-performance graphics and experience a major leap in the company’s next-generation architecture.
Since both NVIDIA and AMD are design houses without factories, there is always concern about whether TSMC will be able to meet the manufacturing demand for its chips, but it seems that COVID19 has turned things around in its favor as both companies have swallowed the bit of space ceded by other customers. This includes the latest generation of CPUs and GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD.
For now, HiSilicon and Qualcomm are ahead of AMD, however, the company will become TSMC’s largest 7nm customer by the second half of 2020, dethroning both Qualcomm and HiSilicon. AMD recently placed an order for 30,000 wafers at a stroke, which represented 21 percent of TSMC’s total capacity at that time.
At the same time, NVIDIA has also acquired much of TSMC’s capabilities, a sign of the acceleration in the time to market that the company is preparing for its next generation of amp graphics cards (or whatever NVIDIA wants to call them).