According to China’s Taiwan Business Times, industry sources said that at the end of this year Apple will become the first customer to use TSMC 3nm chips, the first product may be the M2 Pro chip (or will be used in new products such as the Mac Pro), and next year, including the new iPhone 15 Pro dedicated A17 application chip, as well as the M2 and M3 series chips, will be imported into TSMC 3nm.
According to the report, Intel will expand the use of 3nm production processors within the second half of next year (tiles), AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Broadcom, etc. will gradually complete 3nm chip design and start mass production in 2023-2024.
Previously TrendForce said that Intel Meteor Lake core orders were delayed, this move significantly impact TSMC expansion plans, resulting in 3nm process from the second half of this year to next year the first wave of customers only Apple, products include M series chips and A17 Bionic chips. Therefore, TSMC has decided to slow down its expansion schedule to ensure that capacity will not be overly idle and lead to cost pressure.
TrendForce expects that the move will affect some of next year’s capital expenditure planning, resulting in TSMC’s capital expenditure scale next year may be lower than this year.
