Che-Chia Wei, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), said it will take a long time for Elon Musk’s plan to build massive, cutting-edge chip plants from scratch to come to fruition, and that his company is not afraid of competition from Intel, Samsung, or anyone else in the chipmaking business.
“I would say only ‘good luck’ on Elon Musk’s terafab,” Wei told the company’s annual general assembly on June 4 in answer to a shareholder’s question about the SpaceX CEO’s plans for a plant to produce one million wafers per month. “It will take quite long to [materialize].”
“In the past 30–40 years, we always faced all kinds of competition and we are not afraid of competition,” Wei said. “In the past, I think we won, and I believe we will continue to win.”
Wei commented specifically on TSMC’s relations with Intel, as its longtime customer is now increasingly competing with the Taiwanese chip titan in the realm of contract chipmaking and chip packaging services, rather than sticking to only producing chips for in-house use. “Now Intel is still one of our top ten customers,” Wei said. “We want to earn money from them and also would continue to protect our own intellectual properties and trade secrets.”
The CEO also said that continuous hikes in component prices could hurt the consumer electronics industry, vowing that TSMC would not hike prices like some of the “memory chip guys.” Unprecedented shortages of memory chips have already hit demand for PCs and electronics.
“We won’t raise prices like memory chips—all of a sudden 400% hikes in the short term. Although I do envy their 80% gross margins, we won’t do that. That’s not realistic,” Wei said. “We really think customer trust and sustainability is more important.”
The company is also keeping an eye on the Middle East, he said, where tensions “have added further uncertainty to the outlook” for the industry.
Wei maintained the company’s outlook for 2026, saying revenue in US dollars could grow 30% as the company continues to build more capacity to meet unprecedented customer demand for massive AI computing infrastructure.
“Our customers and our customers’ customers who are mainly cloud service providers continue to give us positive outlooks, so thus we are keeping the faith that [the] AI mega trend will last for multiple years,” Wei said.
TSMC said its capital spending would reach a record this year of as much as USD 56 billion.
Last week, TSMC’s major customer Nvidia announced that its largest artificial intelligence supercomputer platform to date has entered full production. The system incorporates Rubin GPUs, Vera CPUs, networking switch chips, and other key chips, all manufactured by TSMC.
Additionally, Nvidia and MediaTek, also a key TSMC client, unveiled a push into personal computers for the emerging agentic AI era. Meanwhile, several of TSMC’s other major customers including Arm, Marvell, and Qualcomm highlighted the chipmaker during the Computex trade show in Taipei as their key manufacturing partner for the latest generation of data center and PC processors.
TSMC has reduced the share of profits allocated to employee bonuses to 10% from the previous 12%, as the chipmaking giant increases spending on environmental, social, and governance initiatives, including investments in renewable energy. The move is also intended to support the company’s goal of sourcing 100% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2040.
While there have been complaints from employees about their bonuses, Wei said he has promised that, although the percentage is lower, the value will grow 30% from 2025, and he expects that trend will continue in future years if employees and the management team continue to work hard and grow together.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.