The cloud provider analogy shows lock-in economics: cloud margins are high because switching clouds is time-consuming and expensive, and Amazon or Google's quarterly earnings reflect that they are doing just fine.
The cloud provider analogy shows lock-in economics: cloud margins are high because switching clouds is time-consuming and expensive, and Amazon or Google's quarterly earnings reflect that they are doing just fine.
Of the 3x yearly compute growth, 1.2x comes from building new fabs, and that process is bottlenecked through 2030 and potentially beyond by the ability to build ASML EUV machines. This gives ASML a structural bottleneck as AI compute capacity scales.
AI is absorbing leading-edge wafer allocation that previously went to smartphones and PCs; at TSMC's leading-edge N3 nodes AI will go from 60% to 86%. Once all leading-edge wafer capacity is absorbed by AI, that reallocation source of compute growth hits a wall, making TSMC's leading-edge capacity increasingly scarce.