Chips made on TSMC’s 5nm processes accounted for 19 percent of the company’s revenue in 2021. Such chips are mainly in smartphones. 7nm production accounted for 31 percent of sales. TSMC’s total revenue rose sharply in 2021.
TSMC has been making chips at 5nm since 2020 and the company has been earning revenue from this since the third quarter of that year. Apple and Qualcomm, among others, have their latest socs for smartphones made on the 5nm process of TSMC. The M1 chips for iPads, MacBooks and iMacs are also made using this process.
In December 2021, sales from the 5nm process accounted for 23 percent of total sales. For the year as a whole, this amounted to 19 percent. Last year it was only 8 percent, but deliveries of 5nm chips only started at the end of that year. The 7nm process, on which AMD Ryzen processors and chips for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S are made, among other things, accounted for 31 percent of sales last year. A year earlier, it was 33 percent.
Of the total revenue in 2021, 44 percent came from chips for smartphones and 37 percent from chips for high performance computing. Under this category, TSMC not only includes chips for servers and data centers, but also processors for desktop PCs and consoles. TSMC’s annual turnover amounted to 1587 billion Taiwan dollars, which is about 50.1 billion euros. This is a growth of 18.5 percent compared to 2020.
The chip factories of the Taiwanese TSMC are running at full capacity. At the beginning of 2021, the company announced that it would invest EUR 85 billion in new factories over the next three years to meet the growing demand for chips. This will focus on increasing the production capacity at 5nm, but also on the new N3 node for 3nm production. Production is due to start in mid-2022 and that should result in deliveries of 3nm chips in early 2023.