AMD has become Taiwan chipmaker TSMC's third-largest customer, Bloomberg and DigiTimes analysts believe. Apple remains the leader in the race, but the third place gives AMD a lot of advantages & ; being a key customer allows the company to work closely with the contractor and influence the upgrading strategy of production facilities.
For years, AMD used GlobalFoundries and TSMC, but in 2018, GlobalFoundries decided to pull out of the advanced technology race, and AMD's focus shifted to TSMC. Today, the Taiwanese contractor produces a wide range of products for AMD, including CPUs, GPUs and SoC & ; for which it uses N7 and N6 technologies (different versions of the 7-nm process). And the customer, accordingly, provides the Taiwanese partner with a noticeable part of the revenue. At the same time, some previously important TSMC customers, including NVIDIA and Qualcomm, began to place orders with another major contract manufacturer & ; Samsung Foundry. As of December 2021, TSMC's largest customer is Apple, which generates 25.93 % of its revenue. For the U.S. customer, the interest in the partnership stems from the fact that the contractor offers the most advanced and expensive N5 and N5P nodes to produce millions of Apple chips. The second place with a large margin is MediaTek (5.80 % of revenue), and the third is AMD (4.39 %). For AMD the benefits of the partnership with TSMC are the introduction of advanced chip packaging technology and the prospect to move to N5 for the new processors on the Zen 4 architecture. When AMD completes the merger with Xilinx, the volume of orders to TSMC will grow with the revenue of the Taiwanese side. NVIDIA, which was once one of TSMC's key customers, now provides only 2.83 % of the contractor's revenue because orders for most graphics on the Ampere architecture were transferred to Samsung Foundry. The Taiwanese company is responsible for the flagship gas pedal A100 for data centers, but the volume of orders of this product is relatively low. In the future, NVIDIA may trust TSMC products on the future architecture Ada Lovelace and Hopper, but so far the graphics giant is only the sixth largest customer of the contractor. The only "dark horse" among the Taiwanese company's customers is Intel (0.84% of revenue as of December 2021). The majority of its orders do not require advanced equipment. However, this could change with the arrival of N3 capacity in 2022 or 2023. & ; Intel could quickly become one of TSMC's top three customers.
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