TSMC Archives | Small Island Research Notes

Before the Power Question, We Still Do Not Fully Understand How AI Will Be Used

Jane2026-01-16T16:19:44+08:00January 16th, 2026|Categories: Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Narrative and Trust, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, TSMC|

Executive Summary In the second half of 2025, the conversation around AI began to shift away from model capabilities and application competition toward concerns about power and infrastructure. As a result, the idea that AI growth will be constrained by electricity has quickly taken hold as a narrative that feels both reasonable and intuitive. However, from the perspective of on the ground deployment and operations, as well as from the upstream supply side, the most

From TPU Sales to Governance Redistribution: Broadcom’s Role in AI Is Quietly Changing

Jane2025-12-04T12:21:03+08:00December 4th, 2025|Categories: Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Amazon and AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Google, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, MediaTek, Meta, Microsoft, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, TSMC|

Executive Summary Broadcom has long been one of Google’s key partners in building the TPU architecture. As Google plans to make its TPU technology available to external customers, this partnership is entering a new phase. Broadcom’s role is shifting from that of a co-designer to that of a modular integrator, serving as a stable and indispensable technical pillar within Google’s institutional framework. This position provides stability, but it also limits Broadcom’s ability to influence the

Reshaping the AI Chess Game: Why NVIDIA Is Betting on Intel and Teaming Up with OpenAI

Jane2025-09-23T16:03:19+08:00September 23rd, 2025|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Amazon and AWS, AMD, Arm, ASE, Broadcom, Foxconn, Google, Inventec, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Meta, Microsoft, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Platform and Business Model, Quanta, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, TSMC, Wistron|

Executive Summary NVIDIA recently announced two major moves: investing in Intel to co-develop custom x86 CPUs with NVLink, and partnering with OpenAI to build AI infrastructure at the scale of a million GPUs. These actions may seem independent, but they reveal the same trend: the bottleneck in AI is shifting from the number of GPUs to the efficiency of CPU–GPU integration. In this transition, NVIDIA is reinforcing cross-platform standards through NVLink, Intel is focusing on

When Efficiency Replaces Growth: : The New Language of ASML and TSMC

Jane2025-09-01T10:11:17+08:00July 21st, 2025|Categories: Global Business Dynamics|Tags: ASML, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Narrative and Trust, Policy and Tariffs, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, TSMC|

Executive Summary At the height of the semiconductor boom driven by AI, both ASML and TSMC have begun to repeatedly emphasize a single word: efficiency. This is not simply about operational fine-tuning. It reflects a deeper response to structural constraints. ASML, facing export restrictions and order delays, has shifted its focus toward servicing its installed base. TSMC, constrained by global resource bottlenecks, is reallocating internal capacity and improving throughput to meet surging demand for advanced