TSMC May Score Up To A $15B Manufacturing Windfall From Intel For Next-Gen Chips
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC) is expected to be a big beneficiary of Intel’s plans through 2024-25. According to Goldman Sachs Securities analysts, as relayed by Taiwan’s Commercial Times, Intel is confidently expecting to ship significant numbers of its upcoming processor generations, and it will need TSMC to deliver some of the chiplets and chipsets to support these plans.
The revenue coming into TSMC from Intel over the coming years is expected to be sizable. Goldman analysts estimate that TSMC will secure $5.6bn worth of Intel semiconductor component orders in 2024, followed by an even better year with $9.7bn worth of orders in 2025.
Intel was (in)famously stuck between 14nm and 10nm fabrication processes for years, and though it has made strides recently, it is still in TSMC’s rearview mirror in terms of manufacturing prowess. Due to this differential, engineers within Intel’s design department hope to continue with their close TSMC partnership, according to the Goldman analyst speaking to the Commercial Times.
As we transit from 2023 to 2024, virtually all high-volume products from Intel will be chiplet-based, which the company dubs tiles. Currently, some processor chiplets are made by Intel foundries, notably the CPU cores. Other chiplets, like GPU tiles, will be made by TSMC, which is also the chosen foundry for Intel’s discrete desktop GPUs. With a greater proportion of Intel’s output using the multi-chiplet design and TSMC a favored supplier of some of the chiplets, this is obviously good news for the Taiwanese chip manufacturer.
One naturally wonders whether Intel will gain the confidence and manufacturing prowess to make more, if not all, its processor chiplets in-house post-2025. We guess it might depend largely on its competition with TSMC on the foundry side, and AMD on the chip design side of the business.
