TSMC posts record sales thanks to rising prices

For the very first time, TSMC generates sales of 30 billion US dollars in a single quarter. The outlook continues to look rosy.

Nvidia's AI chips in particular, such as the Blackwell shown here, make TSMC a lot of money.

(Image: c't / Carsten Spille)

Jul 21, 2025 at 3:59 pm CEST

3 min. read

By

Mark Mantel

Chip manufacturer TSMC surpasses the 30 billion US dollar quarterly revenue mark for the first time in its history. The world's largest chip contract manufacturer generated sales of almost 30.1 billion in the second quarter of 2025, almost 18 percent more than in the previous three months and 44 percent more than in the same period last year.

TSMC attributes the growth to a high proportion of modern semiconductors with production technology from the 3, 5, and 7 nanometer classes. However, the figures also point to higher prices. For example, the operating margin grew from 42.5 to 49.6 percent within one year; the net margin from 53.2 to 58.6 percent.

This is reflected in even greater growth in net profit, which rose by 67% year-on-year to a good 12.8 billion US dollars. Compared to the beginning of 2025, net profit is up 17%.

Chart on TSMC's revenue shares of various manufacturing processes — The 5-nanometer generation remains TSMC's top-selling production process. This class also includes the 4 nm processes used by Nvidia and AMD to produce their AI chips, GPUs and CPUs.

(Image: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.)

Rising prices could explain why clients have been increasingly seeking talks with Samsung's semiconductor division in recent months. SSD controller developer Silicon Motion, for example, wants to have some variants produced by Samsung. AMD and Qualcomm are also rumored to be more frequently associated with Samsung.

AI is pouring money into the coffers

TSMC's sales drivers remain AI accelerators for data centers, with Nvidia as the main customer for such chips. Since summer 2019, TSMC has been booking all chips from a notebook processor upwards under the HPC (High-Performance Computing) category. With a 60% share of production revenue, the HPC group is stronger than ever before. In 2019, the HPC share still fluctuated between 29 and 32 percent. At that time, smartphone chips generated by far the most revenue.

Graphic showing how much revenue TSMC generates per application area — "HPC" is by far TSMC's most important business segment. This includes all CPUs, GPUs, accelerators and other chips from the notebook class upwards.

(Image: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.)

TSMC generates around 85% of its total revenue from the production and sale of chips. The remaining 15 percent comes from so-called advanced packaging. In this process, TSMC marries several chips on a common carrier. In the case of Nvidia's AI accelerators from the current Blackwell generation, these are two large compute dies and eight memory modules of the high-bandwidth memory (HBM3e) type.

Meanwhile, TSMC is spending more and more money on research and development. Expenditure is now almost two billion US dollars per quarter—33 percent more than a year ago.

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New record already expected

In the current third quarter, TSMC expects another record turnover of 31.8 billion to 33 billion US dollars. TSMC's share price rose by six percent when the annual report was published. Since then, it has fallen again and stabilized at a plus of around 1.5 percent.

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