Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is raising prices on its cutting-edge 2nm chips, and the increases are steep enough that some of the world's biggest tech companies may be weighing alternatives — specifically Samsung.
According to Wccftech, TSMC's pricing on its 2nm process node could push both Nvidia and Apple toward Samsung, whose competing Gate-All-Around (GAA) chip architecture is now seen as a credible option at more competitive price points.
Meanwhile, a separate data point is adding to the pressure narrative: Google may be in talks with Samsung about manufacturing parts of its Tensor Processing Units — the custom chips that power Google's AI workloads. According to Wedbush, cited by Seeking Alpha, that potential Google-Samsung deal is a signal of how strained capacity has become at TSMC.
"The fact that Google may be talking to Samsung about manufacturing parts of its tensor processing units is a sign of how tight capacity is at Taiwan Semiconductor," Wedbush noted, according to Seeking Alpha.
For years, TSMC has been the undisputed go-to fab for the most advanced chips in the world. Apple designs its iPhone processors there. Nvidia manufactures its AI accelerators there. The company's technological lead has given it significant pricing power — but that power may now be testing the limits of even its most loyal customers.
Samsung has long struggled to close the gap with TSMC in advanced manufacturing, but if price hikes make TSMC's processes prohibitively expensive, even imperfect alternatives start to look more attractive.
If major customers like Google, Nvidia, and Apple begin diversifying away from TSMC — even partially — it would mark a significant shift in the global semiconductor supply chain that has implications for chip prices, AI hardware availability, and the geopolitical calculus around Taiwan.