TSMC’s big Q1 snapshot
Taiwan Semiconductor’s Q1 revenue rose about 35% year‑on‑year to a record $35.71 billion, with March sales up roughly 45% month‑on‑month ahead of earnings. ( ) Wall Street was penciling in roughly $3.30 EPS and the ADR traded higher pre‑report after TSMC’s year‑to‑date share gain of about 137% on AI chip demand. ( )
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing entered earnings week with record first-quarter sales, extending the chip industry’s artificial-intelligence boom into 2026. (investor.tsmc.com, reuters.com) The company said first-quarter revenue reached T$1.134 trillion, or $35.71 billion, up 35.1% from a year earlier. March revenue alone rose to T$285.96 billion, up 10% from February and 46.5% from March 2025. (reuters.com, tsmc.com) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is scheduled to report full first-quarter earnings on Thursday, April 16, 2026, at 2:00 a.m. Eastern time. Before that report, the company’s investor page showed first-quarter revenue above its own guidance range of $34.6 billion to $35.8 billion and gross margin guidance of 63% to 65%. (investor.tsmc.com) The company sits at the center of the contract-chip business, which means it manufactures processors designed by customers including Nvidia, Apple and Advanced Micro Devices. Reuters described it as the world’s largest contract chipmaker and a key producer of advanced artificial-intelligence chips. (reuters.com, cnbc.com) That role matters because the hardest artificial-intelligence chips require the smallest manufacturing processes, and only a handful of companies can make them at scale. In its 2025 results, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing said technologies at 7 nanometers and below accounted for 77% of wafer revenue for the full year, including 24% from 3-nanometer chips. (finance.yahoo.com, cnbc.com) Investors are also watching how much the company spends to add capacity. Yahoo Finance reported that management previously said it planned to spend as much as $56 billion on factories outside Taiwan and in the United States, while TSMC’s Arizona site says a third Arizona fab broke ground in April 2025 for 2-nanometer and A16 production later this decade. (finance.yahoo.com, tsmc.com) The March sales update did not include profit, margins or second-quarter guidance, so Thursday’s report will answer the bigger questions about pricing power and spending. TSMC’s investor page says the first-quarter earnings call will include the financial statements, presentation materials and management report. (investor.tsmc.com) For now, the top-line message is simple: the company that builds many of the world’s most advanced chips is still selling more of them than it expected three months ago. (investor.tsmc.com, reuters.com)
