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TSMC's Price Ladder, Intel's Valuation Gap & Memory's $3T Oligopoly
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC plans a 15% wafer price hike as AI demand outpaces supply three-to-one — while an internal bonus scare reveals the human cost of global expansion. Plus Intel's Northland downgrade and why an $8B leveraged HBM ETF may signal a super-cycle peak.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC's chairman held an emergency all-hands meeting on May twenty-seventh to deny that employee bonuses were being cut. That's where this story starts, and it tells you a great deal about where the world's most important chipmaker is right now.
Now layer in the pricing side of this story, because that's where TSMC's leverage becomes very clear. Three-nanometer wafers currently run around twenty thousand dollars each.
Away from TSMC, Intel is facing a sharper valuation question this week. Northland downgraded the stock and cut its price target to eighty-eight dollars.
The memory side of this briefing is its own separate story, though the thread connecting it to TSMC is supply concentration. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have collectively crossed three trillion dollars in combined market valuation.
One data point worth noting as a sentiment indicator: a two-times leveraged SK Hynix ETF on the Korea Exchange has grown to eight billion dollars in assets over just three months, pulling in one point three billion dollars year-to-date. It's now the largest single-stock leveraged fund in the world.
The near-term watchpoints are clear. TSMC's shareholder call on June fourth is where Chairman Wei will face investor questions on two-nanometer ramp costs, international expansion returns, and how far this pricing ladder can go.
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