TWSC manufactures chips. AMD, NVIDIA, and many other companies design chips which are then manufactured by TWSC. Note how TWSC is the bottleneck. That's why prices are up. Building fabs is expensive with a long lead time and requires a legion of skilled labor. The market decided to put chips in everything from cars to toasters but there supply is still heavily constrained by the few players who possess the capabilities to make advanced semiconductors.
The quote is being taken out of context. Moore's law meant that more chips could be made from a single wafer since the designs became denser. If the density of a chip hits a limit then you can no longer reduce cost through scale. TWSC doesn't care what it makes so long as it's fabs are working to full capacity. It's going to charge whatever the market will bear because it has massive costs to recoup. For consumers, this means that manufacturing becomes a static rather than decreasing percentage of cost. Higher prices are the result.
TSMC is not the only one with leading edge process nodes. Samsung is right on it's heels.
Just this year, both announced the start of production on their 3nm nodes, almost at the same time.
And considering that Liang Mong Song is now at SMIC, that might be another company catching up.
TSMC, drastically increased prices on all nodes. Even older ones, whose development and build cost, was already paid for, many times over.
So it was clearly an action decided by greed, not by technical matters.
Also consider that the N4 node, is just an improvement on the N5 node. Not a full new process node.
The N5 node is already 2 years old. With millions of chips already sold to consumers.
And with N3 starting in H2 2022, it is no longer the leading node.
Toasters and cars don't use leading edge chips. In fact, most of these chips are using rather old process nodes. Lots of them are not even using Finfets.
So that excuse doesn't stick.
Remember when the industry made a switch from 200mm waffers, to 300mm waffers?
That was the biggest investment the industry made as a whole, at any time.
Still prices did not increase at the time, as they are increasing now.
The reason is that for 2 years, chip demand was very high, because mining and working at home.
TSMC decided to increase prices on all nodes, because of a simple matter of the law of supply and demand.
But demand has decreased drastically, so prices have to come down back to normal.
The other thing to consider is that nvidia is not increasing prices by a small percentage. It's almost doubling the price.
A good example is the RTX 4070, that nvidia calls the 4080 12GB, to try to justify the price gouging.
The 3070 had an msrp of 500$. The faux 4070 has an MSRP of 900$.
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