Apple claims half of TSMC 5nm production capacity for 2021

TSMC is a company that fabricates the wafers and thus chips that form your CPU, GPU, chipset, SoC, and so on. A chipmaker. Over the years many clients have been Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and AMD. While AMD has secured a good portion of 7nm production, that seems to change dramatically with 5nm.

A new report indicates that 5nm production is now secured for 50% by Apple. This often works through bids, so the more you are willing to pay, the more production capacity you'll gain. Following Apple, Qualcomm has 24% of the take. A bit worrying to see are AMD at 5%, and NVIDIA at 3%. One issue with the math is that we simply do not know the production capacity of TSMC's 5nm node. So even that 3% and 5% could be sufficient for what the companies need. However, given the market's current state for 7nm GPUs and CPUs, we do cast some doubts about that.

If we place the numbers into perspective with the current 7nm production, you can see where I get a little bothered (see below). On 7nm AMD currently claims the majority of wafer production with 27% of the production capacity, Nvidia follows at 21% (but they fab their chips at Samsung as well).

 
An interesting observation is that intel started at 7nm with a small portion of the available pie. TSMC is accelerating the production rate to the absolute limit to meet the demand. We do have to say that the current focus for NVIDIA and AMD is 7nm, next year these values all can shift easily in their direction again.