TSMC has been doing great in recent years amid huge chip shortages. Now the situation is changing. All of TSMC’s top 10 customers have reduced their orders amid declining demand, according to DigiTimes.
The source does not name the entire ten clients, but we are definitely talking about Apple, Nvidia, AMD, MediaTek and Qualcomm.
The decrease in the volume of orders is very significant. So, production facilities using the N7 process technology at the beginning of 2023 will be loaded only by 50%, and the lines with the N5 and N4 process technology will be far from being fully loaded. The source notes that more worrying is the fact that lines with the old N28 process technology will also be underutilized, which were fully loaded all the time that there was a shortage of chips on the market.
The situation is that TSMC will be willing to accept compensation from customers as it will hold wafers with chips from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and other companies before they are ready to buy them. TSMC is even ready to renegotiate the terms of long-term supply contracts.
