TSMC Bans Clients from Reselling Wafer Capacity; AI Demand Still Far Exceeds Supply
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TSMC Chairman C.C. Wei banned customers from transferring wafer-capacity quotas, while pledging to ramp output as fast as possible — AI chip demand still far outstrips supply, making fab capacity the scarcest resource in the AI race.
Why can't customers resell their capacity?
On the Q3 earnings call, Wei stated plainly: customers may not transfer or auction wafer-capacity quotas to third parties.
This means → TSMC keeps the allocation lever in its own hands. Capacity is not a tradeable commodity.
In rare cases, customers can collaborate through mask-authorization agreements — legal arrangements letting one company manufacture using another's chip design — but such deals are uncommon and tiny in scale.
How large has advanced packaging grown?
AI chips keep getting bigger, making packaging — the technology that stitches multiple chips together — a bottleneck. TSMC is now mass-producing packages five times the standard reticle size, with good yields and positive customer feedback.
The company is pushing toward nine-times reticle size and developing fourteen-times technology. In plain terms = the chip "jigsaw puzzle" keeps doubling in area, each step testing manufacturing limits.
TSMC is also developing CoPoS (Chip-on-Panel-on-Substrate), a new packaging route that replaces the wafer base with a panel and is expected to cut costs significantly. For now, however, customers still prefer CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate).
How strong is demand for the A14 node?
Wei revealed that customer interest in A14 has already surpassed N2-generation demand at the same stage.
This means → TSMC expects A14 to become a larger node than N2 — demand for each successive leading-edge process is accelerating, not tapering.
Asked whether IDMs — integrated device manufacturers that both design chips and run their own fabs — might pull orders back in-house, Wei said TSMC treats all customers equally and factors each client's own capacity into allocation decisions.
How much will capex rise?
CFO Wendell Huang said capital spending from 2026 to 2028 will be significantly higher than the prior three years, with equipment, materials, and labor costs all climbing.
Yet the primary driver is long-term demand, not equipment prices. TSMC's target: revenue growth outpacing capex growth — achievable, Huang said, as long as execution stays on track.
This reflects TSMC's core bet: spend more now on expansion rather than risk missing the AI demand wave.
Where is AI demand spreading?
Wei noted that AI demand still far exceeds TSMC's supply capacity, and is broadening from GPUs and other accelerator chips into more chip categories.
Driven by agentic AI — AI systems that autonomously execute tasks — CPU demand is also growing steadily. In plain terms = AI is no longer just a "buy GPUs" story; the entire chip supply chain is being pulled forward.
Whether capacity can keep pace with this demand diffusion is the key test of TSMC's capex payoff going forward.
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