WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Is the AI crisis showing any signs of abating? Not according to C.C. Wei, the CEO of TSMC. Speaking at the company's annual shareholders' meeting, Wei said the world's largest contract chipmaker won't be able to meet customer demand for years. He also revealed that TSMC would "like" to raise prices for its customers.
Wei said demand for AI chips remains extremely strong and customers are still upbeat about the industry's outlook. "It will be a long time before we can meet customer demand," he said.
That's not exactly a surprising revelation, of course. TSMC sits at the center of the AI hardware boom, producing advanced chips for many of the companies spending billions of dollars on accelerators, servers, and data center infrastructure.
Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Broadcom, and others depend heavily on the Taiwanese firm, which means every surge in demand eventually lands on TSMC's doorstep.
Wei said the company is working hard to avoid becoming a bottleneck in the global semiconductor supply chain, but the problem is no longer just about wafer capacity. According to reports, the squeeze now extends across equipment suppliers, upstream vendors, power, chipmaking capacity, and advanced packaging. So even if TSMC wants to build more, the rest of the industry has to keep up as well.
