🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Behind TSMC’s sales surge is a massive spending and capacity expansion plan

• High-performance computing (HPC), which includes chips for data centers and AI servers, made up about 60% of TSMC’s Q4 revenue in 2025 1.
• TSMC raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $52 billion to $56 billion, at least 25% higher than 2025 1.
• The plan targets supply bottlenecks that constrained growth in 2025 by boosting advanced packaging capacity. This includes Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS), a method of combining multiple chips into one high-performance package that has been sold out for two years 1.

The cloud faces a growing risk from physical attacks

• Data center risk now includes battlefield-style threats, not only outages tied to software or networks.
• Big Tech facilities have become military targets. Iranian drone strikes damaged two Amazon Web Services (AWS) sites in the UAE and one in Bahrain 2.
• The strikes disrupted banking and other apps. AWS advised customers to keep data outside the region and to activate disaster recovery plans 3.
• This changes how companies judge cloud safety. Security planning now must factor in kinetic warfare (physical attacks), and some experts say future data centers may need missile defense systems 3.