Apple continues to be the “giant” to contract more than half of TSMC’s 5nm chip production line in 2021

According to a recent statistic, Apple expects customers to order the largest scale production of 5nm chips from TSMC. It is expected that 5nm chip orders from Apple can account for 53% of TSMC’s total 5nm chip production.

Next is Qualcomm with a market share expected to account for 24% of TSMC’s total 5nm chip production because Apple will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X60 5G modem chip on the upcoming iPhone 13 series.

Rumor has it that both TSMC and Samsung have reached 90% of the production capacity of 5nm chipsets by 2021 alone.

As for the 7nm chip manufacturing process, AMD is expected to be TSMC’s largest customer, accounting for 27% of total orders. Followed by NVIDIA with 21% of total production and MediaTek in third, with 10%. Intel ranked fourth with 7%. Talking about the US chip company, Intel, although not bad at making chips, the company is slowly falling behind its Asian rivals as Intel recently had to outsource TSMC to a large number of chips.

A few months ago there were rumors that Apple had pre-ordered TSMC’s full 5nm chip production capacity but it seems that TSMC doesn’t want to “put all eggs in one basket” at this point. TSMC started giving incentives to Apple for a long time because nearly one fifth of its total revenue came from Apple.

But it is also TSMC’s incentives for Apple that are the reason why Qualcomm awarded the contract to manufacture Snapdragon 888 chips to Samsung. The previous generation was the Snapdragon 865 which was still manufactured by TSMC.

TSMC is still rushing to develop a 3nm process and if nothing changes, Apple will still be the first to “pre-order”. However, Apple is currently producing its own chips for iPhone, iPad and Mac, so in the near future, TSMC may no longer be the main chip supplier for Apple.

According to recent information from the Digitimes site, TSMC has ambitions to grow further and gradually reduce its dependence on chip outsourcing for big companies like Apple. Specifically, TSMC is expected to spend tens of billions of dollars this year to promote research on 5G, automotive electronics and high-performance computers (HPC).

See Gizmochina