At Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s annual shareholder meeting in Hsinchu on June 4, 2026, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei delivered a message that read less like a routine governance event and more like a state-of-the-AI-industry address: demand for advanced chips is still outrunning what the world’s largest foundry can produce, and TSMC is finally talking openly about leaning into its pricing power.
“We continue to see increasing adoption of AI models across consumer, enterprise and sovereign AI applications,” Wei said, according to a summary of the meeting. On capacity, he was blunter: TSMC “can only produce so much.”
The combination — structural shortage in the most advanced nodes, paired with an explicit willingness to negotiate higher prices with customers including Nvidia and Apple — is exactly the setup the bulls have been arguing for since the second half of 2025. It also helps explain why TSMC’s Taiwan-listed stock has more than doubled in twelve months.
What Wei actually said about pricing
The most quoted line of the meeting was Wei’s response on whether TSMC would raise prices. “I’d like to do that,” he said, before adding the qualifier: “We still need to make money.” That sounds anodyne; in context, it is not. Foundries historically anchor pricing to long-term wafer agreements that customers treat as semi-fixed. Wei publicly opening the door to higher prices for the most demand-constrained nodes is a signal to the buy side that gross margin can rise from here.
He was equally explicit about how TSMC plans to behave — and crucially, how it does not. “We don’t want to suddenly raise prices like memory companies do,” Wei said. “That’s not sustainable.” Memory pricing notoriously whipsaws through boom-and-bust cycles. TSMC’s brand promise is the opposite: a steady, premium logic foundry where customers can plan ten-year roadmaps.
Why this matters for TSM shareholders
TSMC reported 2025 revenue of $122.42 billion and net income of $55.13 billion on output of roughly 15 million twelve-inch equivalent wafers. The foundry’s roughly 70% global share of pure-play foundry revenue means any pricing increase on advanced nodes flows directly to operating profit — there is no second supplier with comparable yields at 3nm or 2nm to undercut.
The pricing signal arrived alongside a capacity update that, on its own, would have moved the stock. Wei said the company’s two land parcels in Arizona are sufficient for the next ten years. Stacked on the planned “gigafab” complex of six facilities and an incremental $100 billion Arizona commitment announced in mid-2025, TSMC’s U.S. footprint is now budgeted at roughly $165 billion — a number that, twelve months ago, would have been an unimaginable U.S. semiconductor capital plan.
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 revenue | $122.42B | Full-year, reported |
| 2025 net income | $55.13B | 45.0% net margin |
| 2025 wafer output | 15.02M | 12-inch equivalent wafers |
| Foundry market share | ~70% | Global pure-play foundry |
| Arizona total commitment | ~$165B | Across six planned fabs |
| Profit sharing change, 2023→2024 | +30% | Per Wei’s AGM remarks |
| Profit sharing change, 2024→2025 | +30% | Same source |
| Profit sharing change, 2025→2026E | +30% | Wei’s on-stage guidance |
The 2nm transition is the unlock
The capacity narrative is inseparable from the node narrative. TSMC transitioned to its 2nm process (N2) in late 2025, swapping FinFET transistors for gate-all-around nanosheet structures. Versus an enhanced 3nm process, N2 delivers “a 10 to 15% performance boost or a 25 to 30% reduction in power consumption” at the same density. For AI accelerator designers, that translates almost directly into either more tokens per watt or smaller racks for the same throughput — the variable hyperscalers care about most.
Wei also flagged the boundary of TSMC’s tooling ambitions. The next-generation High-NA EUV lithography machines, which can cost up to $400 million each, are not currently needed for production at the company’s pace of node shrinks. That is a quiet way of saying TSMC believes it can keep extending performance on its existing tool set for at least one more node generation, rather than absorbing the capex shock that High-NA would entail.
What a 12-month chart looks like
The customer concentration question
Wei named Nvidia and Apple by name during the meeting, and TSMC’s supplier list also includes Broadcom and Qualcomm as its largest customers. The market reaction tends to treat that concentration as an asset rather than a risk: while a slowdown in any one of those names would matter, the same names collectively define the most demand-resilient parts of the chip cycle. AI accelerators, modems, smartphone application processors, and merchant networking silicon are all sold into customers with either monopoly-like end markets or sovereign-AI buyers underwriting demand.
Geopolitics, of course, remains the wildcard. The accelerated Arizona buildout — six planned fabs, two parcels of land sufficient for ten years, and a budget approaching $165 billion — is the most expensive insurance policy in industrial history against Taiwan Strait risk. Wei’s framing at the AGM treated it as table stakes rather than a strategic pivot.
The takeaway for the tape
For investors watching the AI tape, the meeting reinforced three things. First, the bottleneck on AI compute remains physical, not financial — Nvidia’s order book is gated by TSMC’s wafer starts, not by hyperscaler capex appetite. Second, the foundry that controls the bottleneck has both the willingness and the customer goodwill to widen margins from here. Third, the U.S. manufacturing pivot is fully under way and is being funded by the host company, not by the U.S. government’s $6.6 billion preliminary CHIPS Act award.
None of that is a recommendation. But Wei’s calm, on-the-record signal that TSMC intends to raise prices “without doing it like memory companies” is the kind of management language that gross-margin upgrades are built on — and it landed at the same shareholder meeting where the chairman thanked employees for a tripled share price.
Sources
- Investing.com, “TSMC boss upbeat on outlook as AI boom shows no sign of easing,” June 4, 2026 — primary source for AGM quotes, share-price data, profit-sharing comments, Arizona land commentary, High-NA EUV comment.
- Wikipedia, TSMC overview — 2025 revenue $122.42B; net income $55.13B; 15.02M wafer output; ~70% foundry market share; N2 process specifications; customer list; Arizona “gigafab” plan.
- U.S. Department of Commerce, CHIPS Act preliminary award to TSMC Arizona — original $6.6B direct funding award context for the U.S. buildout.
Disclosure: This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed before publication. It is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.