Compute

TSMC clears $39.6B
in Q2, rockets
past seasonal patterns
on AI chip
demand

The world's largest contract chipmaker posted record April–June revenue of NT$1.27 trillion, up 36% year-on-year, with June sales alone jumping 67.9% — breaking a four-year summer decline and setting up a July 16 earnings print analysts expect will show a fifth straight quarter of record profit.

By Felix Aroyan Compute & infrastructure · July 14, 2026

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. booked NT$1.27 trillion in second-quarter revenue, or roughly $39.62 billion, a 36% year-on-year jump that clears the top of the company’s own April guidance range of $39 billion to $40.2 billion and edges past the LSEG SmartEstimate of NT$1.264 trillion drawn from 20 analysts. The Form 6-K filed with the SEC on July 13 also disclosed June revenue of NT$442.68 billion, up 6.2% from May and 67.9% from June a year earlier. Nothing about that shape is normal. TSMC has posted a summer decline in each of the past four years.

The seasonal break is the story beneath the headline number. Historically, the June quarter softens as smartphone builds pause before the fall cycle. This year, the AI accelerator packaging line runs so hot that it swamps the consumer cadence entirely. SemiAnalysis’s Sravan Kundojjala estimates AI chips will contribute more than $40 billion of TSMC’s 2026 revenue, close to 25% of the total, with advanced packaging (CoWoS in particular) remaining the industry’s binding constraint for roughly two years now. Nvidia and Apple sit at opposite ends of the same fab: one absorbing every 3-nanometre wafer it can get, the other pre-buying 2-nanometre capacity that hasn’t ramped yet.

The market has priced this. Taipei-listed shares closed up 1% on Monday ahead of the disclosure and are up 57% year-to-date, pushing market capitalization to roughly $1.955 trillion per Reuters on July 13 and near $1.97 trillion by July 14, nearly double Samsung Electronics’. First-half revenue of NT$2.40 trillion (about $74.99 billion on CNBC’s conversion) is 35.6% above the same period last year.

Thursday’s July 16 earnings call is the tell. An LSEG poll of 18 analysts projects Q2 net profit of NT$632.6 billion, or $19.65 billion, a 58.8% rise that would mark a fifth consecutive quarter of record earnings. Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council minister Wu Cheng-wen has flagged two new advanced packaging plants planned for Chiayi Science Park, an implicit acknowledgment that the bottleneck is structural, not cyclical.

The counter-signal, quietly buried in Fortune’s July 14 briefing, is that Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo all posted double-digit percentage year-on-year shipment declines in Q2, and memory shortages are now expected to run into 2027. TSMC’s 73% share of the global pure-foundry market in Q1 (Counterpoint Research) means every rerouted wafer flows through one Hsinchu-based P&L. The AI capex cycle isn’t lifting the semiconductor industry so much as concentrating it, and the concentration is showing up in exactly one set of financials.

Sources