[alephnerd]

They both contract TSMC to fabricate their chips.

The actual design and R&D is still done by Nvidia, Cerebras, AMD, Groq, etc.

Think of TSMC like Kinko's - they do printing and fabrication which is very low margins.

The main PMF for Cerebras is in simulations, drug discovery, and ofc ML.

As I've mentioned before on HN, Public-Private Drug Discovery and NatLab research has been a major driver for HPC over the past 20 years.

[est31]

TSMC has a market cap of 0.9T USD. It would be the 7 largest US company by market cap if it were one. Manufacturing chips is extremely profitable, at least in the current climate. It used to be that software is more profitable than hardware, which is more commoditized, but AI gave hardware companies a renaissance of sorts.

It's not a simple process at all but requires a lot of engineering and engineers to do it.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/usa/largest-companies-in-the-... https://companiesmarketcap.com/tsmc/marketcap/

[alephnerd]

> Manufacturing chips is extremely profitable

It only became profitable NOW in the last 2-3 years.

Before that, foundry after foundry was shutting down or merging.

TSMC, UMC, Samsung, Intel Foundry Services, and GloFlo are the last men standing after the severe contraction in the foundry model in the 2000s-2010s due to it's extremely high upfront costs and lack of moat to prevent commodification.

[extesy]

TSMC margins are over 30% and growing [1] - that's very far from "low".

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...

[alephnerd]

30% net due to a near monopoly and a recent upswing due to Nvidia.

Almost every other foundry system died because of low net margins.

Software (and fabless hardware like chip design) is expected to have 60-70% gross margins or the ability to reach that.

Semiconductors is part of TMT just like Software or Telecom, and this has an impact on available liquidity.

This is why TSMC is heavily subsidized by the Taiwanese government.

[extesy]

TSMC is neither software nor fabless. I'm not sure we are talking about the same company, there seems to be some disconnect here. For hardware business 30% margins are high, Apple is one of the most famous exceptions.

[alephnerd]

> For hardware business

When a foundry wishes to raise capital from the private or public markets, it's bucketed under TMT - which includes software and fabless hardware as well.

This means it's almost impossible to raise capital without a near monopoly and/or government support and intervention - which is what Taiwan did for TSMC and UMC - because the upfront costs are too high and the margins are much lower compared to other subsegments in the same sector.

This is why industrial subsidizes like the CHIPS act are enacted - to minimize the upfront cost of some very CapEx heavy projects (which almost everything Foundry related is).

[typon]

Kinko's is not the pinnacle of human engineering - TSMC is. A slight difference there.

[Cyph0n]

> Think of TSMC like Kinko’s

What an amazingly reductive analogy :)