The rising prices of semiconductor products are not showing signs of slowing down. Nikkei Asia reports that TSMC will raise prices by up to 10% starting next year, which is bad news for its clients – the likes of Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, AMD and Intel – and that in turn will be bad news for their customers.
The prices for TSMC’s advanced nodes will go up by 5% to 10%, depending on the type of chip and the company buying it. This will make chipsets for future smartphones more expensive. Tablets, laptops, smartwatches and so on will likely be affected as well.
The bad news is that we’re not just talking about higher prices for bleeding edge 2nm designs like the upcoming Tensor G11 from Google. Even the so-called mature nodes – 12nm, 16nm and 28nm – will get up to 10% more expensive.
TSMC justifies this by saying that the new prices will reflect the higher costs of materials and manufacturing equipment as well as the construction of chip fabs outside of Taiwan.
Again, the price hike is planned for the start of 2027 and it should be a few months before its impact is felt in consumer devices. But it is coming.
It’s no wonder that we’re seeing reports like Apple looking to diversify its chip production by negotiating with Intel and Samsung. Speaking of Intel, the company reportedly wants to bring the majority (80%-90%) of compute tile production for Nova Lake CPUs in-house and fab them on its 18A node. Previously, 60%-70% of the tiles were meant to be fabbed by TSMC on N2. As for Qualcomm, the Snapdragon chip designer is pondering a return to Samsung.
Source (paywall) | Via