The second quarter of 2025 was a windfall for the world’s chipmakers, with international foundry revenue climbing 14.6% to an unprecedented $41.7 billion.
But the real story is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, which seized a staggering 70% market share on the back of soaring demand for AI accelerators, smartphones, and next-gen PCs.
TSMC’s strongest quarter yet
TrendForce’s latest data shows TSMC pulling in just over $30 billion for the quarter, its strongest showing yet. That kind of dominance doesn’t happen by accident. As rivals stumble, TSMC has leveraged its process leadership to lock down contracts for the chips powering everything from Apple’s iPhones to Nvidia’s data-center GPUs.
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Nearly three-quarters of TSMC’s sales now come from 7nm nodes and below, with 3nm alone accounting for roughly a quarter of wafer revenue. Those are the wafers underpinning Blackwell GPUs, AMD’s Zen 5 CPUs, and Apple’s M-series Macs.
This timing matters. Smartphone demand rebounded after a bruising few years, while PC makers stocked up ahead of a wave of AI-capable laptops set to arrive this fall. Nvidia, meanwhile, continues to hoover up every high-performance wafer it can find, driving record shipments of GPUs for both data centers and consumers. TSMC’s advanced packaging capabilities — critical for stacking memory and compute together — gave it an edge its competitors can’t match at scale.
Chips continue to flow
By comparison, Samsung managed a respectable 9% growth in its foundry business but remains a distant second with 7.2% of the market. Its wins include smartphone silicon and the chip at the heart of Nintendo’s Switch 2, but the gulf between the Korean firm and TSMC has never been wider. Intel’s fledgling foundry operation is still a fraction of the size, despite the billions being poured into U.S. fab projects.
According to the report, China's SMIC dipped 1.7% in revenue from last quarter, thanks to advanced-node production issues and the resulting shipment delays, putting it in third place, with 5.1% market share.
For PC enthusiasts and gamers, the implications are twofold. The good news is that more advanced chips are flowing than ever, easing the kind of shortages that left GPU shelves empty in 2021. The bad news? They won’t be cheaper. TSMC’s upcoming 2nm node is expected to carry a price premium over 3nm, and Nvidia has already nudged GPU pricing upward to compensate for rising wafer costs.
That tension — more supply, higher cost — defines the silicon industry in 2025. And with TSMC now controlling seven out of every ten dollars spent in the foundry market, it’s clear that the company is doing more than just riding the AI wave.
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