Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company posted June revenue of NT$398.27 billion, up 67.9% from a year earlier, pushing first-half sales to NT$2.4 trillion, a 35.6% increase over the same period in 2025. The numbers landed ahead of Thursday’s full second-quarter earnings and came in roughly NT$1.27 trillion for the quarter, edging past the NT$1.264 trillion consensus of 20 analysts surveyed by LSEG. Shares rose about 1% on Monday, a muted reaction for a beat that, in any other sector, would have been treated as a shock.
The scale of the acceleration is the story. First-half growth of 35.6% year on year already exceeds the more-than-30% full-year revenue expansion TSMC guided for in April, and that guidance was in US dollar terms, a stricter hurdle given the currency tailwind. Capital expenditure for the year is slated between $52 billion and $56 billion, a budget that would have looked fantastical five years ago and now reads as maintenance spending for the world’s only irreplaceable chipmaker. New fabs in Arizona, Japan and Germany are absorbing the bulk of it, built as much for sovereign supply-chain logic as for pure economics.
The AI engine is doing the heavy lifting. Chief Executive Che-Chia Wei described demand as “extremely robust” in April, driven by the shift from chatbots to agentic AI systems that act rather than answer. That transition requires significantly greater computing power, and TSMC sits at the centre of it: Nvidia’s GPUs, Amazon’s Trainium, Google’s TPUs and Microsoft’s Maia all flow through its Taiwanese foundries. Advanced nodes, seven nanometres and below, accounted for 74% of wafer revenue in the first quarter. The three-nanometre node alone contributed 25%.
Supply constraints remain the binding variable. Reports indicate Nvidia has reserved roughly 60% of TSMC’s advanced chip-packaging capacity for 2026, a figure that suggests the bottleneck is not wafer starts but the complex integration steps that follow. That concentration is a risk factor no analyst models explicitly, because there is no alternative to model.
Thursday’s earnings will test whether the revenue beat translates into margin expansion or simply higher utilisation at flat pricing. Gross margin, operating margin and the rollout timeline for two-nanometre technology are the metrics that will decide if the stock’s 1% pop was a yawn or a missed signal. The guidance update matters more than the print: TSMC has a habit of raising the bar quietly, then clearing it by a hair.