Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs.
Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?
I tend to agree with you, feels to me like the root of this is essentially whether foundries will "go all in" on AI like the rest of the S&P 500. But why trade away one trillion-dollar customer for another trillion-dollar customer if the first one is never going away, and the second one might?
I think it is less of a trade and more of a symbiotic capital cycle, if I can call it that?
Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.
That is the traditional textbook yield curve logic, if I'm not wrong? Smaller area = higher probability of a surviving die on a dirty wafer.
But I wonder if the sheer margin on AI silicon basically breaks that rule? If Nvidia can sell a reticle-sized package for 25k-30k USD, they might be perfectly happy paying for a wafer that only yields 30-40% good dies.
Apple OTOH operates at consumer electronics price points. They need mature yields (>90%) to make the unit economics of an iPhone work. There's also the binning factor I am curious about. Nvidia can disable 10% of the cores on a defective GPU and sell it as a lower SKU. Does Apple have that same flexibility with a mobile SoC where the thermal or power envelope is so tightly coupled to the battery size?
I am curious about the binning factor too since in the past, AMD and Intel have both made use of defect binning to still sell usable chips by disabling cores. Perhaps Apple is able to do the same with their SoCs? It's not likely to be as granular as Nvidia who can disable much smaller areas of the silicon for each of their cores. On the other hand, the specifics of the silicon and the layout of the individual cores, not to mention the spread of defects over the die might mitigate that advantage.
With current AI pricing for silicon, I think the math’s gone out the window.
For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads - and that’s after the node yields have been improved via the gazillion iPhone SoC dies.
NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards, but the VRAM situation is clearly making that less important, as they’re cutting some of those SKUs for being too vram heavy relative to MSRP.
Datacenter GPU dies cannot be binned for Geforce because they lack fixed function graphics features. Raytracing acceleration in particular must be non-trivial area that you wouldn't want to spend on a datacenter die. Not to mention the data fabric is probably pretty different.
> For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads
The Pro and Max chips are different dies, and the Ultra currently isn't even the same generation as the Max. And the iPads have never used any of those larger dies.
> NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards
NVIDIA's datacenter chips don't even have display outputs, and have little to no fixed-function graphics hardware (raster and raytracing units), and entirely different memory PHYs (none of NVIDIA's consumer cards have ever used HBM).
This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though, is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia’s 2025 revenues. Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively, which I’m sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting slow-growth story compared to new upstarts.
I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.
I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.
So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
Doesn't seem like LLM generated text to me. Even prior to ChatGPT some journalists preferred to write in a novel-style with extraneous fluff like that.
Explains why Apple is looking to diversify their fabs with Intel. If Intel can stay on their current trajectory and become a legitimate alternative they will do very well as a fab with additional available capacity.
The key here is Intel is expanding the idea of operating their fab for an external customer (foundry services). What they’re doing with specific fabs or processes is less important relative to their bigger emphasis on working for a client like Apple.
In some areas they may be shifting resources. But a lot has happened since last summer. They have received some cash infusions and 18a is in full production with yields, apparently, at acceptable levels. Rumors are Apple has already signed on.
New CEO said he'll continue with Foundry provided he gets significant customers to justify the cost. In a recent comment/press release, Intel said they are continuing production on 14A. Ergo, they have external customers (or Trump is bullying him into it, but I suspect it's mostly the former).
It seems a bit odd that data center operators aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Data center operators say: expand more quickly.
TSMC says: we need long term demand to justify that.
And all the data center guys say is: don’t worry that won’t be an issue, trust us.
I would think that if they were serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum purchasing agreements.
And what of the natural resources sustaining all of this? This conglomerate of data centers, gpus and other chips will surely have to push manufacturers to the maximum in other industries. I don't think sustainable energy, recycling and carbon credits will be enough to cover for it.
> I would think that if they were serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum purchasing agreements.
That would ruin TSMC and others' independence.
Nvidia already did buy Intel shares so it is a thing.
Nvidia did discuss with TSMC for more capacity many times. It's not about financing or minimum purchasing agreements. TSMC played along during COVID and got hit.
How do you figure? Demand for electronics skyrocketed when everyone working from home bought new laptops webcams, tablets.
There was a fire on a TSMC manufacturing line that caused a shortage early on but capacity recovered, demand stayed strong throughout and there was a massive spike at the end when car manufacturers needed to ramp back up to handle all the paused orders.
As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.
That's great! Apple has the resources to incentivize and invest in alternate production capacity(Intel, Samsung, or others). Sure, it will take years, but a thousand mile journey begins with one step...
> Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors
In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.
TSMC is already producing at their first one in Arizona (N4 process), second one comes online for N3 in 2028, and third one (N2) broke ground in April 2025 (online date 2029-30)
The projects seem to go well and then union bosses threaten to shut the whole thing down.
Then the essential skilled personnel can’t come train people because the visa process was created by and is operated by the equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities. Sometimes companies say fuck it we’re doing it anyway and then ice raids their facility and shuts it down.
I’d post the news articles about th above, but your googling thumbs work as well as mine.
Alternatively, China could make progress fabricating and exporting its own chips and designing its own GPUs. The entire chip sector could go the way of solar panels and EVs with prices dropping and margins collapsing to near zero.
Buy in-demand fab output today, even at a premium price and even if you can't install or power it all, expecting shortages tomorrow. Which is pretty much the way the tech economy is already working.
So no, no hedge. NVIDIA's customers already beat you to it.
oh, darn. my least favorite walled garden / vertical monopoly / rentseeker will have to raise prices. I'm sure they can spin this as a quality improvement.
I'm surprised that Apple is not considering opening up its own fabs. Tim Cook is all about vertical-integration and they have a mountain of cash that they could use to fund the initial startup capex.
Semiconductor manufacturing is not an incremental step for Apple. It's an entirely new kind of vertical. They do not have the resources to do this. If they could they would have by now.
Designing CPUs also wasn't their core business and they did it anyway. Apple probably won't care that much about price hikes but if they ever feel TSMC can't guarantee steady supply then all bets are off.
I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be values by customers?
Apple has very much been wanted absolute flexibility to adopt major technology changes so much they’ve tried hard to not be the sole customer of a supplier and deal with political ramifications (source: Apple in China/Patrick McGee)
Closer to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a fab, then continually use the brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather than the world at large.
You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.
How much new capacity is under construction? Seems like it should be a lot, but other than Arizona and Ohio and a few other places I'm not reading about a ton of cutting-edge node fab construction happening.
I find that my cell phone which is 4 generations old and my desktop computer which is 2 generations old are totally adequate for everything I need to do, and I do not need faster processing
But do you use any ai services like chat gpt, Claude, Gemini? If so you’re offloading your compute from a local stack to a high performance nvidia gpu stack operated by one of the big five.
It’s not that you aren’t using new hardware, it’s that you shifted the load from local to centralized.
I’m not saying this is bad or anything, it’s just another iteration of the centralized vs decentralized pendulum swing that has been happening in tech since the beginning (mainframes with dumb terminals, desktops, the cloud, mobile) etc.
Apple might experience a slowdown in hardware sales because of it. Nvidia might experience a sales boom because of it. The future could very well bring a swing back. Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)
I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.
I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM.
I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..
I feel like China invading Taiwan isn't happening in our lifetimes. Yes, they stand to benefit from it, but I doubt any of the people in charge of decision making are that interested in rocking the boat. There's nobody forcing their hand and the country is doing great without needing to invade anyone.
Let's hope China doesn't get a leader like Donald Trump in our lifetimes, then I think your prediction will apply. Despite the political tensions, China and Taiwan are so deeply integrated economically that an invasion would hurt not only Taiwan and the global economy, but also China (directly and indirectly). The EU and the US are making efforts to re-shore some semiconductor manufacturing, but TSMC and others will probably still keep a sizable amount of manufacturing in Taiwan, so I don't think this interconnectedness will change anytime soon...
It seems that their leaders are and have been planning to take over Taiwan for decades. At least according to most of what I’ve read on the topic from all the various sources.
If or when China’s economic and/or demographics issues become problematic is exactly when the CCP likely would want to strike. At least seems to me like it’d be a good time to foment national pride.
Of course hopefully I’m wrong and you’re right.
Many of these larger geopolitical things are decades in the making. Even Trump’s Venezuela action has been a long time brewing. So much so that “US troops in Venezuela” has become a trope in military sci-fi. The primary change with Trump is how he presents and/or justifies it, or rather doesn’t.
There's some intersection point between long term decreasing in China's ability (demographic collapse) and long term increase in China's ability (their current build up of military hardware in air, land, and sea that is currently outpacing America's). Maybe somewhere in 10-20 years where their regional military power is much higher than America can project across the Atlantic but they still have a lot of military aged men.
The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it not being cutting edge). And the US will stand-down and let China take Taiwan with no serious conflict in exchange for supply agreements. Not more than 5-10 years out at this point.
The US can't even remotely come close to stopping China in its own backyard today, in another 5-10 years they'll just have that much larger of a Navy. The US knows that's the situation. The US can supply a large one week bombing campaign against China and that's it, based on inventory levels. The US will exhaust its cruise missile supply instantly and the US has almost no meaningful drone-bomb supply. China can build cheap missiles by the tens of thousands perpetually, train them to the coast, and flatten Taiwan and any opponents as necessary. China is the only country that can sustain a multi-year WW2 style bombing campaign today, thanks to its manufacturing capabilities. Imagine them on a full war footing.
Yeah, I just don’t know that there’s the will to blow up the world economy for which flag flies over Taiwan.
China absorbing Taiwan (especially to Americans) just doesn’t seem like a radical, terrifying concept.
A Hong Kong style negotiated transfer might be best for the world - Taiwanese that want to leave can, the US can build up a parallel source of semiconductors, China gets Taiwan without firing a shot.
> The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it not being cutting edge)
USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the US mainland for a long time now. 30% of all 2nm and better technologies are slated to be produced in Arizona by 2030.
The real loser in all of this will be the EU which will be completely without the ability to produce or acquire chips. They'll just end up buying from China and USA, which will only further deepen their dependence on those countries.
Has the Ukraine situation not shown that the EU has relegated itself to second fiddle?
It’s too old, too complacent, and too broke. Even compared to the US and our level of discord, there’s no unity across divisions.
The US absurdly threatens Greenland, but Denmark/EU’s response is “Sanction US tech or kick out US military bases on Europe”, rather than be able to rattle a saber back and show some credible backbone.
Without San Diego based Cymer they can't move forward on their latest and greatest. As far as I know they still do R&D in San Diego even after purchase.
Tim Cook failing on the Cook doctrine ("We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make") is ironic.
I'm sure if Apple could manage to run a fab with the quality and costs they get with TSMC, they would. I have little doubt they've been pushing forward on that mission.
Owning a leading edge fab is not practical for most companies, even huge some ones like Apple.
Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally didn’t sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop, desktop, and server chip market.
Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip fabricator, but there’s no guarantee it would be as good as TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an ability to sell capacity to other customers.
At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and outbid Nvidia for priority.
Is it karma or is it just normal business activities? When you're a large player like this you get pricing power. If another large player moves in and also has pricing power then negotiations and things like that take place. Business deals, profits, &c. all ebb and flow and this is no different.
Weird take. If you want to undertake approximately a bajillion dollars in capex to prove out and scale up a new node, it is extremely to have one massive, anchor customer who will promise well in advance to offtake basically the entire thing for a bit and who has creditworthiness exceeded by few non-sovereign entities, and thus is able to write contracts against which it is easy to lend. Also this customer makes little chips (when your defect rate is higher) and bigger chips (when your defect rate is lower). Of course you don't try to synthesize this profile out of a bajillion tiny customers.
Here's what G AI estimates when asked about "base on public data, estimate how many mm^2 of apple/Nvdia silicon are produce in TSMC for the past 3 years."
Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?
Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.
Apple OTOH operates at consumer electronics price points. They need mature yields (>90%) to make the unit economics of an iPhone work. There's also the binning factor I am curious about. Nvidia can disable 10% of the cores on a defective GPU and sell it as a lower SKU. Does Apple have that same flexibility with a mobile SoC where the thermal or power envelope is so tightly coupled to the battery size?
For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads - and that’s after the node yields have been improved via the gazillion iPhone SoC dies.
NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards, but the VRAM situation is clearly making that less important, as they’re cutting some of those SKUs for being too vram heavy relative to MSRP.
The Pro and Max chips are different dies, and the Ultra currently isn't even the same generation as the Max. And the iPads have never used any of those larger dies.
> NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards
NVIDIA's datacenter chips don't even have display outputs, and have little to no fixed-function graphics hardware (raster and raytracing units), and entirely different memory PHYs (none of NVIDIA's consumer cards have ever used HBM).
For example the regular M4 can have 4 P-cores / 6 E-cores / 10 GPU cores, or 3/6/10 cores, or 4/4/8 cores, depending on the device.
They even do it on the smaller A-series chips - the A15 could be 2/4/5, 2/4/4, or 2/3/5.
The flat line prediction is now 2 years old...
If Nvidia pays more, Apple has to match.
Not a system that necessarily works all that well if one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the rest.
You can't let all your other customers die just because Nvidia is flush with cash this quarter...
I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.
The giant conglomerates in Asia seem more able to do it.
Google has somewhat tried but then famously kills most everything even things that could be successful if smaller businesses.
So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/intel-layoffs-25-perc...
That would ruin TSMC and others' independence.
Nvidia already did buy Intel shares so it is a thing.
Nvidia did discuss with TSMC for more capacity many times. It's not about financing or minimum purchasing agreements. TSMC played along during COVID and got hit.
As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.
Which barely impacts TSMC. Most of their revenue and focus is on the advanced nodes - not the mature 1s.
> As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in there.
When did I imply there was a demand dip? I said they built out too much capacity.
Apple can and should do it again!
> Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors
In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
I know about the existence of the initiative but I don't know how it is progressing / what is actually going on on that front.
https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm
There's ~a dozen in the works or under construction
TMSC plans to have 2-3nm fabs operational in the next 2-3 years
So we're 2-3 years behind the standard (currently 2nm), and further behind on the bleeding edge sub-2nm fabs
Then the essential skilled personnel can’t come train people because the visa process was created by and is operated by the equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities. Sometimes companies say fuck it we’re doing it anyway and then ice raids their facility and shuts it down.
I’d post the news articles about th above, but your googling thumbs work as well as mine.
I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.
Buy in-demand fab output today, even at a premium price and even if you can't install or power it all, expecting shortages tomorrow. Which is pretty much the way the tech economy is already working.
So no, no hedge. NVIDIA's customers already beat you to it.
I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be values by customers?
You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.
As would almost innumerable others.
Also Nvidia's margins are higher which means that they will be willing to pay a higher unit price.
This seems like an open and closed case from TSMC's side.
I’m not saying this is bad or anything, it’s just another iteration of the centralized vs decentralized pendulum swing that has been happening in tech since the beginning (mainframes with dumb terminals, desktops, the cloud, mobile) etc.
Apple might experience a slowdown in hardware sales because of it. Nvidia might experience a sales boom because of it. The future could very well bring a swing back. Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)
I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.
I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM.
I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..
Data is saying demand >>>>> supply.
If or when China’s economic and/or demographics issues become problematic is exactly when the CCP likely would want to strike. At least seems to me like it’d be a good time to foment national pride.
Of course hopefully I’m wrong and you’re right.
Many of these larger geopolitical things are decades in the making. Even Trump’s Venezuela action has been a long time brewing. So much so that “US troops in Venezuela” has become a trope in military sci-fi. The primary change with Trump is how he presents and/or justifies it, or rather doesn’t.
It will likely be a naval plus air blockade to force a political solution to avoid the messiness of an invasion, but time is on China's side there.
Long term: demographics are worsening for China relative to now or 5 years ago.
Short term: China doesn’t yet have viable homegrown replacements for ASML, TSMC, etc.
Really short term: China blockading Taiwan and suffering the economic fallout would be much more painful than US blockading Cuba/Venezuela/etc.
A decisive kinetic action or a very soft political action, rather than a blockade seems more viable in the current state.
The US can't even remotely come close to stopping China in its own backyard today, in another 5-10 years they'll just have that much larger of a Navy. The US knows that's the situation. The US can supply a large one week bombing campaign against China and that's it, based on inventory levels. The US will exhaust its cruise missile supply instantly and the US has almost no meaningful drone-bomb supply. China can build cheap missiles by the tens of thousands perpetually, train them to the coast, and flatten Taiwan and any opponents as necessary. China is the only country that can sustain a multi-year WW2 style bombing campaign today, thanks to its manufacturing capabilities. Imagine them on a full war footing.
China absorbing Taiwan (especially to Americans) just doesn’t seem like a radical, terrifying concept.
A Hong Kong style negotiated transfer might be best for the world - Taiwanese that want to leave can, the US can build up a parallel source of semiconductors, China gets Taiwan without firing a shot.
USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the US mainland for a long time now. 30% of all 2nm and better technologies are slated to be produced in Arizona by 2030.
The real loser in all of this will be the EU which will be completely without the ability to produce or acquire chips. They'll just end up buying from China and USA, which will only further deepen their dependence on those countries.
It’s too old, too complacent, and too broke. Even compared to the US and our level of discord, there’s no unity across divisions.
The US absurdly threatens Greenland, but Denmark/EU’s response is “Sanction US tech or kick out US military bases on Europe”, rather than be able to rattle a saber back and show some credible backbone.
They sent warships to Greenland. What level of saber rattling do you expect?
My conspiracy theory is that there is some kind of "gentleman agreement" on this topic between the US and China.
As soon as Taiwan is not needed anymore by the US for chip fabrication, the US will at the very least loose their grip on it.
Note to commenters: that's my theory, does not mean I endorse it in any way.
Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally didn’t sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop, desktop, and server chip market.
Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip fabricator, but there’s no guarantee it would be as good as TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an ability to sell capacity to other customers.
At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and outbid Nvidia for priority.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/22/apple-chips-to-be...
(Apple is well known for shoving "lesser vendors" out of the way at TSMC)
Also, https://aramzs.xyz/thoughts/dont-post-ai-at-me/