TSMC's AI‑fuelled revenue jump

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing did not just post another good month. On April 10 it said March 2026 revenue hit NT$415.19 billion, up 45.2% from a year earlier and 30.7% from February, which is the kind of jump you get when customers are still scrambling for the most advanced chips. (tsmc.com) That pushed first-quarter revenue to NT$1.134 trillion, up 35.1% from the same quarter in 2025. In U.S. dollars, CNBC put that at about $35.6 billion, and called it a record high for the company. (tsmc.com) (cnbc.com) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is the factory behind other companies’ chip designs. Nvidia, Apple, and Advanced Micro Devices can sketch the blueprint, but they still need a foundry with extreme ultraviolet machines, clean rooms, and enough scale to turn those blueprints into millions of working chips. (tsmc.com) The orders surging now are tied to artificial intelligence datacentres. Training an artificial intelligence model can require thousands of graphics processors and accelerators in one cluster, so every new datacentre buildout turns into a giant shopping list for advanced silicon. (cnbc.com) (tsmc.com) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing already showed where that demand was heading in 2024. Its annual report said high performance computing, the category that includes many artificial intelligence chips, made up 51% of revenue in 2024, ahead of smartphones at 35%. (tsmc.com) The other piece of this story is a new manufacturing step called N2. That is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s 2-nanometer generation, and the company says it started volume production in the fourth quarter of 2025, giving customers a newer lane for faster and more energy-efficient chips. (tsmc.com) N2 also changes the transistor design itself. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing says this generation uses nanosheet transistors, which are a new structure meant to improve performance and reduce power use as chips get harder to shrink. (tsmc.com) That helps explain why investors looked past the usual worries about tariffs and geopolitics for a day. If March revenue is rising 45.2% year over year while the company is ramping a new 2-nanometer process, customers are signaling that artificial intelligence spending has not cooled yet. (tsmc.com) (cnbc.com) It also shows why governments keep chasing chip factories. In March 2025, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing said it would add $100 billion to its United States plans on top of an existing $65 billion commitment in Phoenix, taking its total planned U.S. investment to $165 billion. (tsmc.com) So the revenue spike is not just a sales number. It is a readout on whether the artificial intelligence boom is still forcing companies to buy more of the hardest chips to make, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s March report says the answer, at least for now, is yes. (tsmc.com) (cnbc.com)