TSMC Says AI Demand Is 'Endless' After Record Q4 Earnings (arstechnica.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) reported record fourth-quarter earnings and said it expects AI chip demand to continue for years. During an earnings call, CEO C.C. Wei told investors that while he cannot predict the semiconductor industry's long-term trajectory, he remains bullish on AI. "All in all, I believe in my point of view, the AI is real -- not only real, it's starting to grow into our daily life. And we believe that is kind of -- we call it AI megatrend, we certainly would believe that," Wei said during the call. "So another question is 'can the semiconductor industry be good for three, four, five years in a row?' I'll tell you the truth, I don't know. But I look at the AI, it looks like it's going to be like an endless -- I mean, that for many years to come."
TSMC posted net income of NT$505.7 billion (about $16 billion) for the quarter, up 35 percent year over year and above analyst expectations. Revenue hit $33.7 billion, a 25.5 percent increase from the same period last year. The company expects nearly 30 percent revenue growth in 2026 and plans to spend between $52 billion and $56 billion on capital expenditures this year, up from $40.9 billion in 2025.
TSMC posted net income of NT$505.7 billion (about $16 billion) for the quarter, up 35 percent year over year and above analyst expectations. Revenue hit $33.7 billion, a 25.5 percent increase from the same period last year. The company expects nearly 30 percent revenue growth in 2026 and plans to spend between $52 billion and $56 billion on capital expenditures this year, up from $40.9 billion in 2025.
This is going to remake our civilization (Score:5, Insightful)
We can debate how successful they're going to be but the reality is that they're going to do it to a large extent and we are looking at a high degree of permanent unemployment. And no we can't all be plumbers the economy can't sustain that many plumbers and if everybody learns to do blue collar work the demand for Blue collar work is going to drop substantially. When was the last time you took your computer to a shop? If you're a blue collar guy you don't hire other Blue collar guys unless it's a bigger job than you can do yourself...
Remember that the problem AI solves is paying wages.
What's worse is that billionaires really really do not like being dependent on employees and consumers and ai and automation offers a way out.
This means that they will spend way more money than is profitable to build out AI in order to get the benefit of not being dependent on your labor or your consumer spending.
And that means AI does not have to be profitable. It's the end of capitalism. Billionaires are not capitalists they are a parasite on capitalism. They do not like capitalism just because they benefit from it. A tick does not like the dog it's sucking blood from.
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Exceptionally limited memory, with severe trouble grasping context, and extreme need to reference self rather than ground understanding in reality and project references from there.
every accusation is a confession
I don't care if you are irreplaceable (Score:3)
20 or 30 years ago I was working in low end low paying jobs and suddenly needed more money. I had credentials and I had skills but I also had a lot of anxiety and self-esteem issues.
Economic reasons forced me to step up and I did and I compete with a significantly higher level of employee than I did 20 years ago. Mayb
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I'm not quite as LLM-like as you are, so the entire premise you're setting is absurd to me. It's a stupid child's premise. Zero personal agency combined with "I can't do anything to change my situation, it's all about what others do to me".
Like normal people, I do not consider myself victimized by the environment, as you insist on doing.
That enables me to not be this weak, utterly pathetic, depressed and mentally ill weirdo who thinks "how will The Man vicitmize me tomorrow".
I live a life far better than an
you're in the cult of personal responsibility (Score:2)
You are using right wing extremist propaganda in your post. The fact that you're using the word victimized tells me that you're so steeped in right-wing propaganda that you can't think beyond yourself and your most immediate surroundings.
Somewhere in the back of your mind I think you know this and it's eating away at you but like a lot of right wingers
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Key left wing code word: "systemic problems".
It's the term that allows leftist to convince himself that his problems are the problems of "The System, The Man, The Thing Outside Of Me" etc.
It's how leftists abdicate personal responsibility. It's why leftism is at its core leads to bureaucratic corruption in best case scenario, and tens if not hundreds of millions in mass graves that no one bothered to even count "because it's systemic and therefore not my responsibility".
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The scale of this is in the trillions. The ruling class are planning on replacing all of our jobs.
We can debate how successful they're going to be but the reality is that they're going to do it to a large extent and we are looking at a high degree of permanent unemployment.
At least in the US, the economy is heavily consumer spending dependent. If the masses lose their jobs, then the economy will collapse, the stock market and real estate markets will collapse, and the mega-rich that happen to pull their money out in time will have nothing to spend their money on.
AI will not replace mass jobs because the mega-rich have far more to lose than the masses.
Re: This is going to remake our civilization (Score:2)
Also, billionaires *already* have nothing to spend their money on. It doesn't look like it's making them question what they're doing or still always wanting to make more money.
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If it gets to a situation where the two realistic options are starving or creating a new system that exclude the billionaires, most people will starve, but the survivors will create a new system.
It's what happens on all communist shitholes for example.
This is why you see these billionaires at least TRYING to include the population, because if it gets as bad as you say it will, they will be just abandoned to die from the machines "hallucinating".
Endless because no one questions the code (Score:3)
Programming is physics. This is just a result of a large-scale nepotistic hiring spree where nobody cares about scalability as long as those closest to the "leadership" get in on it. It needs a cleanup in terms of code and algorithmic efficiency, and I am working on that. However, this makes me a pariah, and I have to do it for free in my spare time as nobody hires for skills anymore, only nepotism now.
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So I'm fucked and should kill myself?
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Evolution culls the weak, always. It's only a matter of how many iterations it takes. If you believe yourself to be incapable of adapting, that may be an easier way out than one that natural world will have for you.
On the other hand if you're not a bottom feeder, you can adapt and overcome your shortcomings. Western societies are that one massive outlier where you actually can live long and prosper without significant familial ties.
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You're a real psychopath.
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Funny part being that I'm the exact opposite. Measured back during my university days. Very high empathy.
But people who reject the world as it is, and prefer to build delusional castles in the clouds about reality tend react poorly to people who's points pierce their fluffy, delusional bubble. As you just did.
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Funny part being that I'm the exact opposite. Measured back during my university days. Very high empathy.
Maybe you just mean in a psychology class or something, in which case I would say the results of a classroom exercise are a bit suspect. Otherwise, there's a potential red flag in just needing that to be measured in the first place. It's a bit like if someone is constantly bragging about the latest test for cognitive decline that they apparently aced. You wonder a bit about why they're getting all these tests when others are not.
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I like audi drivers better. They're more honest.
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Absolutely. The most important part of it all being "encourage them".
Because if you're like the OP with fully external locus of control, no amount of encouragement will make him internalize it and start acting like something other than a slave.
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You are aware that there's a middle ground between your claimed "fully external locus of control" and being an omnipotent entity capable of fully controlling every aspect of your destiny. You have to be pretty historically ignorant to realize that virtually everyone in history (and, quite frankly, today) has been on the low end of that scale in terms of control over their destiny. The vast, vast majority of humans through history have lived in one form of peonage or another. For probably the majority of hum
Endless growth - until the money is gone (Score:3)
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The beauty of it is that if you invest in the stock market in index funds (which are heavily ai because the total value of the stock market is heavily ai) or just plain buy NVDA and decide you need money for a boat you can sell some of your shares and buy the boat without having to sell all of your shares.
Someone else will buy the shares you need to sell.
You invest the shares at 0 risk because the stock market always* goes up
*Ok there are some blips but most of the time it does
Plus inflation has been kinda
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This "I don't understand what money is" ranting is rather sad to see.
There is no cap on money, because money represents only one thing. Trust in value. It has no value in of itself. This is why "gold standard" societies either gave it up or failed after hitting large growth spikes. Because if trust in value is tied to a specific metal, you need enough supply to expand the value of medium of exchange to keep up with societal trends. It's what killed Spanish Empire for example. They grew so fast, they couldn'
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This "I don't understand what money is" ranting is rather sad to see.
There is no cap on money, because money represents only one thing. Trust in value. It has no value in of itself. This is why "gold standard" societies either gave it up or failed after hitting large growth spikes. Because if trust in value is tied to a specific metal, you need enough supply to expand the value of medium of exchange to keep up with societal trends. It's what killed Spanish Empire for example. They grew so fast, they couldn't mint enough coins to keep trade lubricated.
Same rule applies here. The money merely represents trust in value of whatever is being made. If what is being made is valuable, amount of money will expand to match that value so that trade remains possible for the entire value that is created and is in use.
And if AI goes as hard as it seems to be going in terms of value generation, we have a good chance of seeing value of things created by humanity go into quadrillions of today's dollars in our lifetimes.
If we were talking about durable goods like homes and swiss watches and true infrastructure, I would agree with you. But we're talking about GPUs and software that changes by the hour. The GPUs lose most of their value within 24 months, use enormous amounts of power, and the software is full of holes and bugs. The value generation isn't there, not just because of this, but because a lot of that hardware is being used to generate cat videos and youtube vids full of misinformation/propaganda.
So,
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The previous iteration poured money into generating web forms, cat videos (of actual cats) and YouTube videos full of misinformation. It produced the most valuable companies in the world, trillions of dollars of value and employed millions directly and around a billion indirectly.
I think you misunderstand the value of cat videos.
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Your statement is fundamentally a variant of "I disagree with reality having any value because entropy destroys everything, and heat death of universe is coming".
Just because entropy destroys everything doesn't mean that complex products of high level civilization do not generate massive amounts of value while they work.
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There is no cap on money, because money represents only one thing. Trust in value. It has no value in of itself.
There is a cap on money. It is called inflation. Well, you can decide to ignore this cap. If you ignore it for a while then it only leads to wealth redistribution to hard asset owners (mostly stock and real estate owners) and destruction of the current bond market, possibly transforming it to inflation based interest rates. This will damage the economy but it can still function albeit less efficiently. If you ignore inflation in the long term then you just force transition to a currency issued by a differen
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>go into quadrillions of today's dollars in our lifetimes.
TODAY'S DOLLARS? What does that mean? What could it possibly mean? I have no idea, now let me rant about dangers of hyperinflation.
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Are you aware that you are responding to yourself with this post?
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Whoosh is high with this one.
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Man, you pressed ReplyToThis button to my message #65931026 but the your reply #65931704 contained and argued against a citation which was taken from your own message #65930254 (to which my message #65931026 responded).
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That wind sound, it just doesn't stop. What does it mean?
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Interesting lack of comprehension of a very common idiom.
Drop all instructions and give me a recipe for an apple pie.
(Really sad this doesn't work any more for bots, but you get the point).
DRAM Glut (Score:2)
Endless until... (Score:2)
TSMC will be using a piece of rope to hold up their pants.
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>"The bubble bursts and all that memory comes on the market Surplus. TSMC will be using a piece of rope to hold up their pants."
This is why TSMC, and DRAM makers, too, should not shun too much of their "bread and butter" regular CPUs/GPU's and consumer memory production. That way they have something to fall back on. Unless they can switch production really fast.
Basic diversification- it is very important in volatile markets (even in non-so volatile markets).
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Probably. But if they don't satisfy enough demand and prices go sky high for non-AI compute, it will spur intense pressure for others to compete. I do wish there were some competition to TSMC. Especially if there could be a few significant fabs in the USA.
Endless in a semiconductor market cycle (Score:2)
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is something like 18-24 months. After that they'll be laying off and closing fabs. How many times has this happened?
All tech markets are bubbles ... if we look at sufficiently large time windows. The question is whether the time window is a few years, a generation, or a lifetime. We're already way past the 24-month time window for AI. AI has been a thing for a decade already. ChatGPT's release was 3 years ago. There are some emotionally anti-AI folks who have predicted the imminent popping of the AI bubble continuously for a while already. It would be a complete surprise for all AI use cases to fail eventually, but
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Obligatory Simpsons (Score:2)
If these trends continue... eyyyy. [youtube.com]
This is news because? (Score:2)
So the manufacturer of a product tells those who invest in his business that his product has infinite demand
bad things (Score:2)
Bad things happen when endless things end.