Apple is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage (culpium.com) 47
Apple, which spent years as TSMC's undisputed top customer and helped the Taiwanese foundry become the semiconductor industry's most important manufacturer, is now fighting for production capacity as Nvidia's AI chip orders consume an ever-larger share of the company's leading-edge wafer supply.
TSMC CEO CC Wei visited Cupertino last August to deliver unwelcome news: Apple would face the largest price increase in years and the iPhone maker would no longer have guaranteed access to production capacity across TSMC's nearly two dozen fabs.
According to Culpium analysis and its supply chain sources, Nvidia likely overtook Apple as TSMC's largest customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. TSMC's revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, the company reported Thursday.
TSMC CEO CC Wei visited Cupertino last August to deliver unwelcome news: Apple would face the largest price increase in years and the iPhone maker would no longer have guaranteed access to production capacity across TSMC's nearly two dozen fabs.
According to Culpium analysis and its supply chain sources, Nvidia likely overtook Apple as TSMC's largest customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. TSMC's revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, the company reported Thursday.
AI spread now price gauging Apple products. (Score:5, Interesting)
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people will talk like this and then decalre "yeah i voted for trump, 4 times!" and not see the dissonance
we are cooked.
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Not a troll bit. AI is the only means that will ever free every human from all labor and exploitation.
AI will be fully owned by those that already have plenty, and want to give up absolutely none of it. You're completely deluded if you truly believe we're going to be "freed" by this current round of AI. We're going to be further exploited until we're deemed expendable, and then we're going to be rounded up, put in camps, and most likely executed when they decide it costs too much to keep all these non-producers alive. They've already coined the name for those who won't provide value to the owners in that fu
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A fully automated society would inherently be communist
You are wrong. Also you do not understand what communism is. Communism is not sharing, it is centralized decision making system that removes individual's incentive to achieve.
Re: AI spread now price gauging Apple products. (Score:3)
This isn't possible with the current AI tech. And ending the need for work is not going to elimate property ownership and wealth as a source of social and politcal power.
AI may eventually accellerate a bloody class war, as the economy and social hierarchy are upturned from these potential technological advancements.
But humans will cling to owning things and controlling other people long past any practical need to do so. Post scarcity will be hacked with artificial scarity, and in a way we have been doing th
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Just hypothetically suppose that AI fulfills all those promises.
As long as there's something we humans can do that robots/AI can't do, therer's economical incentive to keep us working as much as possible on that, the same hours we work now, as it gives you an edge vs economies that don't do that.
Our productivity today is already multiples of decades ago, and somehow we're still working just as much, why would anything ever change that?
And if literally everything can be automated, how long before those in po
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I don't know? Why did Elon Musk get on a stage with a chainsaw promising to cut the US budget by trillions, and ended up not getting the government to spend any less, but was able to stop aid to third world countries, which will most likely result in the deaths of millions?
He did all that just to get a bit of attention...
Why would they do that? Because we're inferior to them and they have no need for us. Why keep the risk of keeping us around, we could revolt at some point you know.
Re: AI spread now price gauging Apple products. (Score:1)
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The top 10% and more so the top 1% see themselves as righteously "better" than the rest of people.
There is less than zero chance of them giving up their privilege so you can be more equal with them.
At best you will be allowed subsistence living with no chance of changing your social status, at worst they will reduce the worlds population, replacing you with robots.
There is NO WAY those at the top are going to share this world with people like you and me.
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If machines can handle production, logistics, maintenance, and boring administrative work, humans no longer have to sell most of their waking lives just to exist.
No, the humans who OWN the AIs will never have to sell their waking lives just to exist. The rest of us will continue to serve at their pleasure.
What could possibly make you believe that AI will break the cycle of rich people getting exponentially richer at the expense of everyone else? We already produce more than enough food for everyone on earth to eat well, yet millions starve because giving food to the poor doesn't make any money.
There will always be scarcity because the rich people *make it scarce*.
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AI is too important to the human race. If machines can handle production, logistics, maintenance, and boring administrative work, humans no longer have to sell most of their waking lives just to exist. Scarcity shrinks, essentials become guaranteed, and work turns into something you choose to do because it matters or because you enjoy it. That is basically the Star Trek setup, post scarcity economics where automation does the grind and people focus on science, art, exploration, and self improvement. In that world, AI is not a boss or a replacement, it is the background infrastructure that makes a near communist system possible by making exploitation unnecessary and obsolete. It is VITAL to the human race to give AI as many resources as possible, if we have ANY hope of surviving as a species.
This world isn't ready for all that. What we'd see happen is hundreds of thousands being on-target for the government once it is realized they aren't "providing productivity" to the owners. As much as I'd love to live in the fantasy utopia the AI prophets have been trying to sell us, it's gonna be a very, VERY painful transition from here to there with a whole lot of suffering and death along the way. I don't want to be one of the people cheering on that coming suffering, which may explain why this was post
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Perish the thought that all the rabid Apple fanbois/girls will have to buy other phone brands.
Re: AI spread now price gauging Apple products. (Score:1)
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Your talking to someone still rocking a stock 2017 Android phone bought off ebay and I see no reason to not just replace the battery when it inevitably fails as all phone batteries do.
That compared to the ridiculous compulsion of apparently many Apple fanbois/girls that judge their own self-worth entirely on branding and having this year's latest and greatest.
If you believe Apple actually cares about privacy any more than any of the other big data companies, you are seriously just deluding yourself.
Re: AI spread now price gauging Apple products. (Score:2)
I can't help but notice how authoritarian people like to get over this. Bernie in particular thinks the government has both the right and the duty to halt AI development until he determines whether it will lead to the apocalypse. Rsilvergun regularly talks about how civilization isn't ready for AI until he says it is.
It's as if every AI doomsayer thinks they have a crystal ball and humanity will die without their enlightenment. Honestly more annoying than the people who hype AI.
Price hikes coming (Score:5, Funny)
TSMC and China threat (Score:1)
Bubble please pop already! (Score:2)
This competition for computer hardware is really becoming annoying for us consumers. Google, Amazon, and MS are in a market-share fight and using their cash cows (search ads, e-store monopoly, & office-ware) to subsidize AI datacenter builds. This game of chicken cannot last forever, their actual AI revenues don't carry their own water. One of these 3 will eventually blink and expose the bubble for what it is, and Marvin will get his Earth-shattering Kaboom!
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Manufacturing Constraint, You Say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Product shortages due to manufacturing limits and delays?
Sounds like a great time to bump iPhones up to $2k.
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Personally, I'd pay $2K for small-form, rugged iPhone with a home button.
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2k for a phone? That's insane.
Re: Manufacturing Constraint, You Say? (Score:1)
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Not sure what you're on about there. Samsung has offered seven years of updates on its mobile devices since 2022 and Google Pixels have had a similarly long support window for the last couple years as well.
I find iOS unacceptable. I'd stop using mobile devices entirely if it were the only available option.
Jerry Sanders' shade (Score:2)
... is smiling and whispering "Real men have fabs"
Use Henry Ford's model (Score:1)
Go vertical! Before modern MBAs came in and gutted the business, Ford used to own and operate everything from the farms, forests and mines through to part production, vehicle production and sales floors. It guaranteed availability, kept overall production costs low and kept profit margins high.
Now imagine how Apple could survive AI-driven supply disruptions if it owned the whole system from mining and refining, through wafer and chip fab, assembly lines and distribution, along with its existing Apple Stores
TSMC are price-gouging (Score:2)
A 62% profit margin for TSMC means they are gouging Apple and NVidia, as hardware profits are usually 15%-30%.
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A 62% profit margin for TSMC means they are gouging Apple and NVidia, as hardware profits are usually 15%-30%.
The 62% is mentioned as the gross margin, not the profit margin. That's a huge difference. Of course, Nvidia's 75% gross margins are still higher than TSMC's.
Then again, what is gouging? Usually that refers to a time of crisis or emergency. Simply charging more than others in a non-crisis market reflects the ebb and flow of markets. TSMC can charge more than competitors because they're better and because the customers are willing to pay those high prices.
I guess Apple needs to buy a fab now. (Score:2)
Imagine building the ultimate walled garden, then getting told “no wafers for you.” Vertical integration doesn’t help when the bottleneck is TSMC. PC ecosystems can multi-source and route around shortages; Apple’s closed stack can’t. macOS won’t even run on generic ARM.