TSMC is about to lob more money at silicon than most countries spend on roads.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company says it will sharply ramp capital spending across the next three years to keep up with demand for AI chips.
The outfit now reckons revenues from AI chips will grow by as much as 56 per cent a year between 2026 and 2029, higher than last year’s forecast. It also nudged its five-year overall revenue outlook through 2029 from 20 per cent to 25 per cent or higher.
TSMC chief financial officer Wendell Huang said the company would invest “significantly more” over the next three years than the $101bn it invested in capital between 2023 and 2025.
Capital expenditure is pegged at $52bn to $56bn this year, about a third of its spending for the past five years, and almost 30 per cent higher than last year.
That follows a record $16bn net profit in the fourth quarter of 2025, alongside a 62.3 per cent gross margin that beat its own guidance.
TSMC still sits right in the middle of the global supply chain, churning out more than 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced chips. It has stretched its lead over Samsung and Troubled Chipzilla while feeding Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple.
The stock is up nearly 60 per cent in the past 12 months, pushing TSMC into the world’s sixth-largest company by market capitalisation, behind Nvidia, Alphabet, Job’s Mob, Microsoft and Amazon.
Samsung has been talking up the same AI boom as it flagged record quarterly earnings.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has also been banging the drum, saying demand for its H200 data centre chips was “very high”.
TSMC, chief executive CC Wei said, “I’m nervous about whether AI demand is real. I have to invest up to US$56bn this year, and if we didn’t do it carefully, it would be a disaster for TSMC,” before adding that cloud providers “showed me the evidence, and I’m quite satisfied. I double-checked their financial status, and they are quite rich.”
All this lands as Taiwan and the US head into the final round of trade talks, with tariffs expected to fall to 15 per cent from 20 per cent in return for big-ticket investment promises from Taipei.
TSMC has already pledged $165bn for six fabrication plants in Arizona. “We are going to expand many fabs over there,” Wei said, while the company stayed tight-lipped on any fresh US capacity commitments.
