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If you want to secure most of TSMC's top-end fabrication for a given year, you do pay a premium.

Apple did so, and paid so much money they accounted for a quarter of all of TSMC's reveue in 2024; over 20 billion dollars just from Apple alone.



This sounds like a good reason for nVidia to start their own fab then.


Nvidia could certainly try, and they'd likely burn 100s of billions of dollars just to inevitably fail like everyone else who has ever tried.


Nvidia would probably not fail because they work already very closely with TSMC and have teams sitting there directly.

Also Nvidia could even afford to burn 100s of billions of dollars since they are becoming the most profitable company in the world with probably passing Apple this year.

BUT then Nvidia would compete with TSMC and that is a problem because Nvidia is building up a cash and supply moat. Why should Nvidia build TSMC competition if they can simply buy 95% of the packaging supply at TSMC so competitors like AMD and others struggle to get supply? By booking everything at TSMC, Nvidia can easily keep their market share even if competitors improve their products.

This is a huge differences to many industries where most companies have their own production. Imagine there would be only 1 car manufacturer and all other car companies would only design. And now 1 car company would book 100% of supply from the manufacturer. What would the other car design companies do? They would get out of business even if they design better cars.

Nvidia has done this before and that was in the 90s. By speeding up design and releasing new products and more products 2-3x faster than any competitor. The result was that from 90 competitors in 1993, there was only 1 left in 2003 for Nvidia in gaming GPUs.

And Nvidia is doing that again by speeding up their roadmap cadence and as well as booking all supply. Nvidia is crashing competition not only with a great product but by removing their competitors' option to place their product in the market.


TSMC works very closely with their customers and does everything they can to foster good relations with them. They would not allow any one company to completely push out all the others, they know it would be bad for them in the long run.

At the very least, Apple would stop them. They'd never allow anyone to stop production of their precious Apple Silicon.




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