TSMC Can’t Make AI Chips Fast Enough

Last November, during one of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s five visits to Taiwan last year, he and CC Wei, CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., met with reporters. Wei told the assembled media that Huang had come to ask for more chips, to which Huang, standing next to him, replied: “Yes!”

Huang wasn’t the only U.S. tech executive making such requests. In recent months, Broadcom, which places manufacturing orders with TSMC for Google’s tensor processing units, repeatedly asked TSMC for additional production capacity, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. TSMC told both companies it could not give them as much capacity as they wanted, the two people said. A recently reported expansion of TSMC’s production facilities in Arizona won’t do much to help in the near term, as the new facilities won’t come online for years.