TSMC stands at the heart of the AI hardware revolution, quietly dominating both sides of a battle that’s reshaping the semiconductor world. As NVIDIA and AMD scramble to meet soaring demand for GPUs, hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are taking matters into their own hands – designing custom ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) to power their massive AI workloads. 
Yet, despite the tension between traditional GPU giants and the new ASIC movement, one company keeps winning no matter who’s on top: TSMC.
During TSMC’s Q3 earnings call, CEO C.C. Wei addressed this so-called “NVIDIA vs. ASIC war” with characteristic calm. When asked whether it matters if orders come from GPU vendors or AI chip startups, Wei made it clear: both sides rely heavily on TSMC’s cutting-edge process nodes. “Whether it’s GPU or ASIC,” he said, “it’s all using our leading-edge technologies. From our perspective, our customers are growing strongly in the next several years. There’s no differentiation in front of TSMC. We support all types.”
This confident stance makes sense. Virtually every company developing AI hardware – from NVIDIA’s A100 and H100 GPUs to Google’s Tensor Processing Units – turns to TSMC for fabrication. Even the most secretive in-house projects from Big Tech rely on the Taiwan-based foundry’s advanced N5 and N3 process nodes. Google’s Ironwood and Trillium TPUs, co-developed with Broadcom, are manufactured at TSMC. Amazon’s Trainium chips and Microsoft’s Maia accelerators also depend on TSMC’s foundry and advanced packaging services. In short, even when GPU makers and hyperscalers compete fiercely in the market, their chips are born from the same factory floor.
The reason is simple: no one else can match TSMC’s yield, consistency, and scale. Intel’s foundry ambitions continue to lag behind, and Samsung’s high-end nodes have yet to match TSMC’s reliability. For AI companies, time-to-market is everything – and TSMC remains the only foundry capable of delivering both the volume and efficiency these massive projects demand.
In essence, TSMC has become the great equalizer in the AI arms race. As the GPU vs. ASIC rivalry intensifies, the company enjoys the rare luxury of neutrality – profiting from every side of the competition. Whether the future belongs to general-purpose GPUs or custom silicon, one truth remains unchanged: all roads in advanced AI hardware still lead through TSMC.