TSMC

TSMC sells almost exclusively to fabless chip designers rather than end consumers, with North America accounting for roughly 78% of revenue as U.S. hyperscalers and AI-chip designers dominate demand; Asia Pacific, China, Japan, and EMEA make up the remainder. The foundry industry is capital-intensive, cyclical, and concentrated at the leading edge, where TSMC holds roughly three-quarters of pure-play foundry output, with Samsung and a cluster of Chinese and Taiwanese rivals trailing well behind. Customer relationships are sticky once a design is qualified on a given process node.

• Advanced-node mix: 7-nanometer-and-below processes generate roughly 77% of wafer revenue
• Leading-edge split: 3nm ~30%, 5nm ~33%, 7nm ~11%, 2nm ~3% of wafer revenue
• Foundry share: roughly 72-73% of the global pure-play foundry market
• Platform concentration: HPC alone drives about two-thirds of total revenue, up sharply from a decade ago when smartphones dominated

TSMC's advantage rests on process-technology leadership measured in years against Samsung and Intel at the leading edge, reinforced by enormous capital scale — tens of billions of dollars in annual capex that few rivals can match. Switching costs are high: once a chip is taped out on a specific node, redesigning for another foundry is slow and risky, locking in multi-year customer relationships. Its Open Innovation Platform ecosystem of EDA and IP partners further entrenches designers, while advanced packaging capacity has become a second bottleneck competitors struggle to replicate.