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TSMC's HBM Lock-In, Taiwan Export Crimes & Intel's Tesla Signal
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC secures sole 3nm base-die supply for all major HBM vendors while Taiwan moves to criminalize unauthorized AI chip exports to China. Six stories shaping the semiconductor and AI hardware landscape this week.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Japan has formally approved TSMC's second Kumamoto fab for three-nanometre logic production, starting December twenty twenty-eight. The cap is six thousand wafers per month.
The EUV constraint doesn't just shape Kumamoto. It shapes the entire competitive logic of the HBM memory supply chain, and the implications there are significant.
On the export control side, two developments are running in parallel and they're moving fast. Taiwan confirmed plans to criminalize unauthorized AI chip and server exports to China under its Foreign Trade Act.
Intel landed Tesla as a customer for its fourteen-A foundry process. That's the first high-profile external validation of Intel's leading-edge manufacturing roadmap since the foundry strategy came under serious pressure.
The EU's own Court of Auditors now forecasts European semiconductor market share at eleven point seven percent by twenty thirty. The official target was twenty percent.
The key watchpoints from here: whether Japan's fiscal twenty twenty-seven budget expands the Kumamoto II subsidy beyond the current baseline, whether Samsung publishes any credible SF2 yield targets before twenty twenty-seven, and whether Intel names a second foundry customer before its twenty twenty-eight breakeven test arrives. The thread connecting all of this is ASML.
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