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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM) has been on fire recently. After the company reported Q3 results on Oct. 17, the stock jumped 10% on the strength of the business.
A pop like this may discourage some investors from buying Taiwan Semi stock because they think they've missed the boat. However, that's far from the case, as there are still multiple strong reasons to buy the stock, even after the market's reaction to earnings.
New technology will sustain TSMC's growth for many years
Taiwan Semiconductor is the world's leading chip manufacturing company. It makes chips that go into Apple's iPhones, Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), and basically any other technologically advanced device.
Because Taiwan Semi is a chip fabricator, it isn't choosing sides in any of the current technological races. Instead, an investment in Taiwan Semiconductor is essentially a bet that consumers will use more advanced digital devices in the future. This seems like a no-brainer investment, and the company's results back that up.
In Q3, Taiwan Semi's revenue rose 36% year over year to $23.5 billion. Twenty percent of that revenue came from 3-nanometer (nm) chip technology, the company's most advanced product. It's quite impressive to ramp up this quickly because 3nm chips only started contributing to Taiwan Semi's revenue in Q3 of last year.
That also should get investors excited for TSMC's next launch, 2nm chips. N2 chips are expected to launch in 2025 and ramp up in 2026, and this technology is expected to provide massive efficiency gains. While these chips will only provide a 10% to 15% power boost when configured to consume the same amount of energy, they provide a 25% to 30% efficiency boost when configured at the same power level as 3nm chips.
With power consumption (especially with artificial intelligence (AI)-related chips) becoming a big deal, these 2nm chips and the products they go into may become must-have upgrades as they could pay for themselves from energy savings. Preliminary 2nm chip demand is already outpacing its predecessors (3nm and 5nm technology), so it's clear its customers are also excited about this launch.
Although this isn't set to launch until 2025 (with a ramp up in 2026), it lets investors know that a 10% one-day movement in TSMC stock isn't a reason to avoid buying the stock. New products are bringing massive tailwinds, and TSMC hasn't begun to scratch the surface of how AI-related chips will boost its business.
AI chips are in high demand
In Q1, management guided that AI-related chip sales would expand at a 50% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the next five years. After that growth, they expected it would make up more than 20% of the company's total revenue.