AMD becomes third largest customer of Taiwanese giant TSMC

AMD is ahead of Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm in the ranking of the biggest customers of the Taiwanese giant TSMC. A world leader in the manufacture of semiconductors, the group is known for supplying chips to the largest players in the market for their electronic devices and computer components. These are TSMC factories that release the A15 Bionic SoCs for the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro, but also the Dimensity processors from MediaTek or the GPUs used by certain Nvidia chips. AMD, for its part, supplies itself from TSMC both for its processors (Ryzen, Threadripper, Epyc) and for the GPU chips of its graphics cards (Radeon).

This year, Lisa Su’s firm thus managed to rank third among TSMC’s largest customers. Orders placed by AMD alone represent 4.36% of the total revenues of the Taiwanese founder, against 5.80% for the maker of SoC MediaTek and 25.93% for Apple … which remains (by far) the customer. TSMC number 1.

AMD very attached to TSMC, much more than Qualcomm and Nvidia

As Tom’s Hardware recalls, AMD began to collaborate heavily with TSMC about 5 years ago. Until then, the firm subcontracted the manufacture of its CPUs and GPUs to the American GlobalFoundries. The latter having abandoned in 2018 the advanced engraving processes for its production, AMD had been forced to look elsewhere. The brand then naturally fell into the arms of TSMC … without necessarily seeking to diversify its production by ordering from other founders. This loyalty has earned AMD certain privileges at TSMC in terms of production and access to the latest engraving technologies.

Conversely, Nvidia and Qualcomm entrust a significant part of their production to the Korean Samsung Foundry, which explains why they only contribute 2.83% and 3.90% of TSMC’s revenues respectively. For example, Samsung burns Nvidia’s Ampere GPU chips (used on GeForce RTX 3000 graphics cards, in particular) but also Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoCs (expected on many high-end smartphones in 2022).