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TSMC sales jump 30% on strong AI demand
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) said sales rose 30% in January and February to NT$718.9 billion (US$22.6 billion).
TSMC supplies chips to Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, and is viewed as a barometer for AI hardware demand.
The company said strong AI infrastructure construction prior to the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East helped drive the rise.
Analysts on average expect a 33% rise in Q1, while February sales rose 22% as growth was affected by the Lunar New Year, which fell in January 2025.
🔗 Source: Bloomberg
🧠 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.




