TSMC Executive: Demand for AI Equipment Doubles in Six Months

According to ChainCatcher, Hou Yongqing, Senior Vice President and Co-CEO of TSMC, stated on September 2 that the pace of change in AI demand far exceeds any previous industry experience. For example, regarding TSMC’s equipment demand, the estimated requirement at the end of last year for this year, if set at 1x, rose to 1.5x after just one quarter and reached 1.9x by July this year—nearly doubling in just six months. Hou noted that in the past 30 years, the semiconductor industry has never faced such rapid shifts in demand; the entire industry must now deliver nearly double the equipment, capacity, and resources within an extremely short timeframe. Currently, TSMC is simultaneously constructing 13 wafer fabs in Taiwan and approximately 5 to 6 overseas, totaling nearly 20 globally—an expansion scale three to four times larger than before—yet still insufficient to fully meet customer demand. He emphasized that in the AI era, optimization of the entire system or module is required; sequential collaboration is no longer adequate, and the supply chain must be restructured into a new, tightly integrated cooperation model. The entire ecosystem is not yet prepared for such rapid growth; equipment demand has nearly doubled within six months, leaving almost no supplier able to fully avoid capacity constraints.