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TSMC Earnings Preview: CoWoS Crunch, H200 China Restart & Intel's CPU Comeback
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC's Q2 earnings drop Thursday with AI hardware investors watching CoWoS capacity, capex guidance, and whether the infrastructure buildout is holding. Plus: H200 shipments to China resume under license, Intel's Xeon quietly gains ground, and the EU backs German chip sovereignty with €659M.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC reports second-quarter earnings on Thursday, and this particular set of numbers matters well beyond the company itself. Three things to watch: CoWoS packaging capacity, capex guidance, and whether management raises the full-year outlook.
One piece of evidence already in hand: TSMC imposed five to ten percent price increases across its three nanometer, five nanometer, and seven nanometer nodes. Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm are all absorbing those hikes.
Investors who focus only on fab capacity are watching the wrong constraint. CoWoS, the advanced packaging process that stacks memory directly next to compute, is the actual chokepoint in AI chip supply.
Away from Thursday's report, there's a confirmed development in the export control space. Limited H200 shipments to China have begun under approved licenses.
Intel's position in this environment is worth a closer look. The company's data center and AI segment beat expectations in the first quarter of twenty twenty-five on the back of hyperscaler demand for host CPUs in AI server configurations.
The European Commission approved six hundred fifty-nine million euros in German semiconductor subsidies this week. The funding targets four facilities covering silicon carbide epi-wafers, power MOSFETs, metrology equipment, and specialized detectors.
After Thursday's call, the near-term watchpoints narrow to two things. First, does TSMC raise full-year guidance, and does CoWoS capacity expansion accelerate with it.
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