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by vitus 546 days ago
> That is like suggesting TSMC has a monopoly.

They... do have a monopoly on foundry capacity, especially if you're looking at the most advanced nodes? Nobody's going to Intel or Samsung to build 3nm processors. Hell, there have been whispers over the past month that even Samsung might start outsourcing Exynos to TSMC; Intel already did that with Lunar Lake.

Having a monopoly doesn't mean that you are engaging in anticompetitive behavior, just that you are the only real option in town.
1 comments
brookst 545 days ago
This gets at the classic problem in defining a monopoly: how hou define the market. Every company is a monopoly if you define the market narrowly enough. Ford has a monopoly on F150’s.

I would argue that defining a semiconductor market in terms of node size is too narrow. Just because TSMC is getting the newest nodes first does not mean they have a monopoly in the semiconductor market. We can play semantics, but for any meaningful discussion of monopolistic behaviors, a temporary technical advantage seems a poor way to define the term.

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vitus 544 days ago
> Just because TSMC is getting the newest nodes first does not mean they have a monopoly in the semiconductor market.

Sure. Market research also places them as having somewhere around 65% of worldwide foundry sales [0], with Samsung coming in second place with about 12% (mostly first-party production). Fact is that nobody else comes close to providing real competition for TSMC, so they can charge whatever prices they want, whether you're talking about the 3nm node or the 10nm node.

[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-semicon...

Rounding out the top five... SMIC (6%) is out of the question unless you're based in China due to various sanctions, UMC (5%) mainly sell decade+-old processes (22nm and larger), and Global Foundries explicitly has abandoned keeping up with the latest technologies.

If you exclude the various Chinese foundries and subtract off Samsung's first-party development, TSMC's share of available foundry capacity for third-party contracts likely grows to 70% or more. At what point do you consider this to be a monopoly? Microsoft Windows has about 72% of desktop OS share.

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