Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.

TSMC closed at $434.67, up 1.02% and outpacing the S&P 500's 0.17% gain, while the Dow fell 0.18% and the Nasdaq rose 0.4%. The chipmaker is forecast to report quarterly EPS of $4.45, a 52.4% increase from the year-ago quarter, on revenue of $45.54 billion, up 37.59%. For the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates anticipate earnings of $16.55 per share and revenue of $167.09 billion, representing shifts of +55.4% and +36.49%, respectively, from last year. Over the past month the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has risen 0.64%, and TSMC holds a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy). The stock trades at a Forward P/E ratio of 26, in line with its industry average, and a PEG ratio of 0.95.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing has moved its 2nm process into commercial production and raised its capital expenditure targets to support the rollout. The chipmaker said the higher spending is preparation for an intensifying global semiconductor arms race among leading foundries and chip designers. The accelerated 2nm commercialization keeps TSMC aligned with chip designers that need leading-edge capacity for AI and high-performance computing, and the bigger budget gives it more room to secure large multi-year supply commitments from major customers. One early indicator to watch is how quickly 2nm and related advanced nodes contribute a rising share of wafer revenue as new lines ramp up, including whether customer wins such as the MediaTek 2nm decision broaden into multiple large-volume programs that keep those advanced fabs near targeted utilization levels from 2026 onward.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing reported second-quarter 2026 EPS of $4.31 against a $3.8866 estimate, a 10.89% beat, on revenue of $40.2 billion, up 36.0% year over year, with gross margin of 67.7%, up 9.1 percentage points year over year. Advanced nodes at 7nm and below accounted for 77% of wafer revenue, with 3nm at 30%, 5nm at 33%, and 2nm debuting at 3% in its first commercial quarter. August monthly revenue rose 53.3% year over year, and management raised full-year 2026 growth guidance to slightly above 40% year over year in U.S. dollar terms. Management said packaging capacity is so tight that it is now a little bit of customers' growth, pointing to the CoWoS advanced packaging step as the industry's real choke point. The company guided that the steep 2nm ramp will dilute third-quarter gross margin by about 3 to 4 percentage points, while citing an additional $100 billion U.S. investment and a total Arizona commitment of $265 billion, $110 billion in cash and marketable securities, a 2024 to 2029 revenue CAGR approaching 25% in USD, and a long-term gross margin above 56%.

Apple unveiled its first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, on September 9, starting at $1,999 with preorders opening October 16 and availability beginning October 23. The device pairs a 5.4-inch outer display with a 7.6-inch folding inner screen and runs on the A20 Pro chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor. The launch comes as Apple enters a new era under CEO John Ternus, who took the helm on September 1 as longtime leader Tim Cook stepped down after 15 years as CEO to become executive chairman. Apple's fiscal third-quarter revenue increased 16% year over year to $109.4 billion, with iPhone, Mac, and Services each delivering double-digit growth. Siri AI began rolling out in English-language beta on September 14, underpinned by a multiyear collaboration with Alphabet's Google Gemini technology and a separate OpenAI partnership integrating ChatGPT into Siri and Writing Tools. Apple stock trades around $330 a share, roughly 4% below its 52-week and all-time high, at 38X fiscal 2026 consensus earnings estimates of $8.85 per share and 35X FY27 EPS estimates of $9.53, and currently holds a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Meta Platforms is moving deeper into custom AI silicon, with a new generation of internally designed chips set to enter its data centers in the first half of 2027. The company is currently testing its third-generation MTIA 450 processor, code-named Arke, while its successor, MTIA 500, or Astrid, is expected to complete design work in about a month and reach data centers by the end of 2027. Meta is working with Broadcom on chip design and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on production, and has committed to deploying more than a gigawatt of the chips over a 12-month period. Twelve Arke chips delivered by TSMC on Sept. 1 performed within 2% to 3% of Meta's simulations and have already run Meta models alongside models from DeepSeek and Alibaba. Meta also canceled its planned Olympus processor, which was intended to handle both AI training and inference, partly because of cost concerns, and is instead prioritizing inference, the day-to-day running of AI models.

Taiwan-based chip design giant MediaTek announced on the 15th a smartphone chip that uses cutting-edge technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. The new product, the Dimensity 9600 Pro, is the company's first mobile processor to adopt TSMC's most advanced 2-nanometer process. It also announced the Dimensity 9600M, manufactured on TSMC's 3-nanometer process and aimed at a broader range of users. The first smartphones carrying both products are expected to go on sale soon. The 9600 Pro features a neural processing unit, an AI-dedicated processor, that allows more complex generative AI applications to run directly on the phone, and its processing performance from when AI begins handling a question to producing an answer is 51 percent faster than the previous generation. The company has until now supplied chips to China's Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo and others.

Cerebras Systems is expanding its technology roadmap and customer base to strengthen its position in the AI inference market, targeting coding, agentic AI, security and enterprise workloads as it competes with NVIDIA and Alphabet. Core cloud and other services revenues surged 287% year over year to $127.7 million in the second quarter of 2026. The company expects to double system speed annually over the next several years and increase throughput by more than 20 times over the next 18 months, while its disaggregated inference architecture with AMD combines Cerebras systems with AMD Helios racks to raise throughput by up to five times. Its collaboration with Amazon Web Services is expected to bring disaggregated inference to Amazon Bedrock in the first quarter of 2027, and Cerebras supports OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol at a speed that is 10 times faster, with first revenues from other hyperscalers expected around mid-2027. Cerebras signed six deals worth more than $30 million each in the second quarter and added customers such as Cognition, Lovable and Figma in AI coding, while Block, AlphaSense and GSK use its fast inference for agentic workflows and CrowdStrike represents a move into AI-powered cybersecurity. The company has more than 600 MW of data-center capacity live or contracted through the end of 2027, and manufacturing capacity is expected to rise more than tenfold in 2026, supported by secured TSMC wafer supply.

GS Microelectronics U.S., Inc. has officially joined TSMC's Open Innovation Platform Value Chain Alliance as a member partner in North America. The company said the partnership builds on its track record of integrating design enablement building blocks with solutions from OIP Ecosystem partners and delivering comprehensive ASIC services across the entire IC value chain, spanning IP development, front-end architecture, back-end physical design, wafer manufacturing, advanced packaging, assembly, and testing. Founded in 2022, GSME has grown from a Silicon Valley startup into a global operation with sites in San Jose, Phoenix, Hsinchu, Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, and Muscat, backed by Series B funding from Maverick Silicon. President and CEO Farhat Jahangir said joining the OIP ecosystem underscores the company's commitment to a unified, execution-driven platform that gives customers a lower-risk path from early MPW exploration into high-volume production. Percy Chang, Director of Emerging Business Development at TSMC, said combining TSMC's advanced process and packaging technologies with GSME's design and turnkey services strengthens the OIP ecosystem and expands support for mutual customers. GSME is also actively developing 2.5D/3D advanced packaging capabilities, including support for TSMC CoWoS-based architectures serving AI and HPC verticals, tied together by its agentic LLM platform for supply chain visibility from wafer to assembly to yield.

Goldman Sachs now projects 6.5 million humanoid robot units shipped globally by 2035, a sharp upgrade to its prior modeling, in a new Physical AI research report. The firm sees the ramp arriving in phases: 75,000 units in 2026, 890,000 by 2030, revised up from a prior estimate of 256,000, and 6.5 million by 2035, representing a $138 billion market opportunity led by logistics, warehousing, and automotive. Goldman itself reported record Q2 2026 net revenues of $20.3 billion and record EPS of $20.98, with CEO David Solomon describing an AI CapEx super cycle with demands on financing across every instrument, region, and industry. On the compute layer, NVIDIA posted Q2 FY27 revenue of $96.22B, up 105.85% year over year, and guided Q3 to $108.0B, while CEO Jensen Huang said Amazon will adopt its full physical AI stack to power its fleet of warehouse robots. On the foundry layer, TSMC guided Q3 2026 revenue between $44.6 billion and $45.8 billion and expects full-year 2026 revenue growth slightly above 40% year-over-year in U.S. dollar terms, and on the test-and-automation layer, Teradyne reported Q2 2026 revenue of $1.329B, up 103.9% year over year, with Robotics revenue of $100 million, up 33% year over year. Tesla is installing first-generation Optimus production lines at Fremont after decommissioning Model S and X lines, with Elon Musk describing an aspirational target of 10 million units a year of Optimus 4 versus a million units a year of Optimus 3, while the risk alongside the opportunity is a governance one, as Anthropic employees have cited a 10% chance AI wipes out humankind within 10 years and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has floated an agreement among major AI developers to slow down.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reported record August revenue of NT$514.81 billion, up 53.3% year over year, a fresh signal that leading-edge semiconductor demand remains exceptionally strong. The result lands as Broadcom builds out a custom AI accelerator business with hyperscalers, including a Meta program called Iris that Broadcom worked on and TSM fabricated, according to Reuters. TSM's manufacturing position lets it supply competing architectures, so share shifting from Nvidia's merchant GPUs to custom silicon does not necessarily hurt it. Hedge-fund ownership diverged modestly in the second quarter, with TSM held by 249 funds, up from 234, while Broadcom slipped to 170 funds from 173. Short interest stood at about 0.6% of float for TSM and roughly 1.2% for Broadcom as of August 14.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reported record August revenue of NT$514.81 billion, up 53.3% from a year earlier and 10.1% sequentially, with January-through-August revenue up 39.3%. The result signals strong advanced semiconductor demand as Advanced Micro Devices scales its data-center CPUs and AI accelerators, which depend on leading-edge foundry capacity. Barron's noted concerns over reports that TSMC could raise chip prices by as much as 10% next year, with AMD among the customers exposed to higher foundry costs. Hedge fund ownership of both stocks rose in the second quarter, with 249 funds holding TSM, up from 234, and AMD ownership climbing to 164 funds from 134, while short interest stood near 0.6% for TSM and roughly 2.5% for AMD as of August 14.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is trading at $428.29 against a 24/7 Wall St. price target of $492.37, implying 14.96% upside on a buy rating with 90% confidence. The call rests on record August 2026 revenue that surged 53.3% year over year, with January-through-August revenue up 39.3%, prompting management to raise full-year 2026 revenue guidance to slightly above 40% USD growth. Q2 2026 delivered EPS of $4.31 against a $3.8866 estimate, revenue of $40.20 billion, up 36.05% year over year, and a 67.7% gross margin, while Q3 revenue is guided to $44.6 billion to $45.8 billion and the 2026 capital budget was raised to $60 billion to $64 billion. The bull case leans on demand from Nvidia, whose Q3 guide of $108 billion, and Broadcom, whose Q3 FY26 AI semiconductor revenue reached $16.7 billion, up 221% year over year, effectively lock in TSMC's advanced-node order book, while Intel Foundry lost $2.1 billion in its latest quarter. The main near-term risk is gross-margin compression, with the 2nm ramp expected to dilute gross margin by 3 to 4 percentage points and overseas fabs adding another 2 to 3 points of drag, alongside Taiwan-Strait geopolitics as an unpriced tail risk; the bear-case one-year price is $413.79 against a bull case of $525.08 and a sell-side consensus target of $552.38.

JPMorgan raised its forecasts for the wafer fabrication equipment market and named KLA as its top pick among U.S. chip-equipment makers in a note to clients on Friday. Analyst Mio Shikanai lifted the bank's WFE market growth estimates to 31% for 2026, taking the market to $163 billion, 38% for 2027 at $225 billion and 17% for 2028 at $263 billion, a 28% compound annual growth rate over 2025 to 2028. Shikanai said cloud service providers are accelerating their investments in response to further growth in AI-related demand, with spending by the top four U.S. players seen growing at a 58% annual rate through 2028. DRAM memory and TSMC drove the upgrade, with the analyst expecting memory supply to lag demand even in 2028 and TSMC's leading-edge capacity to stay above 100% utilization. Shikanai said she sees the most attractive risk/reward in KLA given its relative underperformance year to date, underappreciated exposure to foundry and logic-led WFE spending in 2027, and potential for upward revisions to consensus revenue estimates, noting KLA shares are up about 50% this year but have lagged peers Lam Research and Applied Materials, up roughly 85% and 82%, respectively.

Asia Plus Securities stated that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, reported August 2026 sales of 510 billion Taiwan dollars, up 10% from the previous month and up 35% compared with the same period last year, marking a continuing record high. Total sales in the first two months of the third quarter of 2026 came to 980 billion Taiwan dollars, up 49% from the same period last year, while total sales in the first eight months of 2026 reached 3.4 trillion Taiwan dollars, up 39% compared with the same period last year. Against the company's third-quarter 2026 sales target of approximately 1.44 to 1.48 trillion Taiwan dollars, Asia Plus assesses that in September 2026 TSMC does not need to significantly accelerate sales, since sales of roughly 460 to 500 billion Taiwan dollars would be enough to meet the quarter's target. Asia Plus views TSMC's August 2026 sales growth, which continues to set record highs, not merely as a positive factor specific to TSMC, but also as a reflection that demand for artificial intelligence, or AI, chips remains strong and that AI investment is still moving forward. Because TSMC is the world's largest chipmaker, its growth is regarded as a key indicator for the direction of the semiconductor industry as well as for other players in the supply chain. Asia Plus views TSMC as still one of the companies that benefit directly from the AI semiconductor cycle. However, Asia Plus recommends gradual buying, as it views TSMC's fundamentals as still strong but believes the share price has already priced in some of the positive factors, with TSMC shares up 58% since the start of the year, or year to date. TSMC is the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, operating as a contract chipmaker, or foundry, for chip design companies that do not have their own fabrication plants, known as fabless firms, such as NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm and Broadcom. On the technical view, Asia Plus assesses TSMC shares as being in a sideways-up pattern, with support at 400 dollars and resistance at 480 dollars.

Shares of KCE and HANA rose sharply, with brokers expecting the electronics group to post strong third-quarter 2026 earnings, tracking the still-upward global semiconductor and electronics cycle, and assigning an overweight investment rating, with DELTA picked as the group's top stock. Most recently, KCE stood at 64.75 baht, up 6.25 baht, or 10.68%, on turnover of 4.29425 billion baht, while HANA stood at 50.25 baht, up 2.25 baht, or 4.69%, on turnover of 1.24979 billion baht. Asia Plus Securities said TSMC's August 2026 sales came in at 510,000 Taiwan dollars, up 10% from the previous month and up 53% from August 2025, while combined sales for the first two months of the third quarter of 2026 stood at 980,000 Taiwan dollars, up 49% year on year and up 14% from the first two months of the previous quarter. The research team believes the overall third-quarter 2026 outlook for Thai electronics stocks will be bright, in line with the still-upward global semiconductor and electronics cycle, and helped by the high season for Thai electronics exports, with overall sales and profits expected to advance toward their annual peak. It maintained an overweight investment rating, expecting normal profits for the full year 2026 among the stocks it covers to grow about 43% year on year and to keep growing by another roughly 41% in 2027. The research team picked DELTA as its top pick with a target price of 342 baht, citing rising global investment in AI and data centers, which is expected to benefit DELTA most within the group because it makes power supplies and cooling systems for AI and data centers. It expects DELTA's profits to grow by an average of about 42% in 2026 and 2027, and noted the stock remains a laggard, having risen 56% since the start of the year, less than HANA and KCE, which have already gained 187% to 209%.

Thai electronics stocks rose prominently this morning, led by KCE, whose price jumped 10.68%, or 6.25 baht, to trade at 64.75 baht. HANA traded at 50.25 baht, up 2.25 baht, or 4.69%. DELTA fell 6 baht, or 2.24%, to trade at 262 baht as of 11:47 a.m. The supporting factor came from August 2026 sales of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., the world's largest AI chipmaker, which came in at 510 billion Taiwan dollars, up 10% from the previous month and up 53% from August 2025. Combined sales for the first two months of the third quarter stood at 980 billion Taiwan dollars, up 49% year on year. Asia Plus Securities stated that third-quarter earnings of the Thai electronics group should be bright, in line with the global semiconductor and electronics cycle, which remains on an uptrend. It gave an overweight recommendation, expecting normal profit for all of 2026 to grow about 43% and to continue growing about 41% in 2027. It selected DELTA as its Top Pick because it benefits most directly from global AI and data center investment, expecting average profit growth of about 42% in 2026-2027, while the share price remains a laggard, having risen 56% since the start of the year, less than HANA and KCE, which have already risen 187-209%.

Positron AI has raised $875 million in a combined Series C and Series C-1 round, valuing the Reno-based startup at $5 billion post-money. The financing, co-led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and SemiAnalysis Capital, represents a roughly five-fold markup from the company's February 2026 Series B valuation of just over $1 billion. The bet is that AI inference economics can be redesigned by replacing supply-constrained high-bandwidth memory with commodity LPDDR5X, the approach behind Positron's Asimov inference ASIC built on TSMC's N3P process. A single Asimov chip carries 288 GB of on-package LPDDR5X, expandable to 2.3 TB via CXL expansion, and Positron claims greater than 90% bandwidth utilization on transformer inference workloads versus less than 30% typically realized on NVIDIA GPUs. Asimov is scheduled for tapeout by the end of 2026, with production slated for the second half of 2027, meaning the chip will not be commercially available for at least twelve months.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, is teaming up with ASML Holding N.V. to advance the semiconductor industry's shift toward larger-format extreme ultraviolet photomasks. The companies established the industrywide initiative on Sept. 7, ahead of the annual SPIE BACUS Conference in Monterey, CA, aiming to establish a 12-inch mask pilot line by 2031 and pave the way for 12-inch High-NA lithography systems to enter advanced-node production by 2033. While High Numerical Aperture EUV will initially be adopted for production using the current 6-inch masks, the transition to larger 12-inch masks is expected to boost fab productivity, lower chipmaking costs and eliminate stitching constraints across the semiconductor industry. TSMC plans to use ASML's High-NA technology in high-volume manufacturing for advanced nodes starting in 2030, and expects more layers to require High NA EUV as nodes advance, primarily because of increasingly complex transistor architectures needed for AI applications. Separately, Intel Foundry and ASML said High NA is now being used in high-volume manufacturing, with more than one million wafers processed to date across early tool certification and testing, research and development, and volume production on select layers for a subset of Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, code-named Panther Lake.

Today's world news brief. Kyodo reports that the U.S. Republican Party opened a special two-day convention in Dallas, Texas, on Wednesday, September 9, to rally forces ahead of the November midterm elections. President Donald Trump took the stage to court votes and promised a large payout of 5,000 dollars to each voter if Republicans keep their majority in Congress. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that a key adviser to Trump warned the Iran war could drag on for the remainder of his term. Samsung Electronics disclosed that the share of iOS users worldwide switching to the Galaxy Z Fold8, launched in July, rose 1.6 times compared with the previous generation, the Galaxy Z Fold7 and Flip7, after Apple just unveiled its first foldable-screen iPhone. TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker from Taiwan, reported August revenue of 514.8 billion Taiwan dollars, or 16.35 billion U.S. dollars, surging 53.3% from the same period a year earlier and up 10.1% from July's level. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launched its new model DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, the smallest model in its new architecture family, designed to significantly boost inference speed and cut processing costs. In addition, the Philippine Coast Guard disclosed that a fire broke out on the passenger ferry MV Juna Aster off the coast of Coron municipality in Palawan province, killing at least 5 people, with 87 others still missing. The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that August 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in history.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported a 53.3% increase in monthly sales, with August revenue reaching NT$514.8 billion, or $16.3 billion, as the company struggles to meet overwhelming demand from the global AI infrastructure buildout. Analysts on average expect 46.8% sales growth for the current quarter. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp. and Apple Inc. has said it cannot catch up with demand even as it builds new factories at an unprecedented pace, with Deputy Co-Chief Operating Officer Cliff Hou saying this month that TSMC is trying to construct and furnish about 20 factories at home and overseas, against a past record of four or five new buildings at once. Hou said the company's needs for chipmaking tools have nearly doubled since the end of last year. TSMC also recently struck an agreement with ASML Holding NV to begin using the Dutch company's state-of-the-art High NA extreme ultraviolet lithography machines in mass production starting from 2030, after previously saying it would not deploy the systems, which can cost $400 million apiece, due to cost concerns. In July, TSMC raised its spending and revenue projections for the year, expecting capital expenditure to reach a record $60 billion to $64 billion in 2026 and full-year sales to grow slightly above 40% in US dollar terms.

Amkor Technology is expanding its Arizona advanced packaging and test campus, raising planned investment to approximately $12 billion, with Phase 2 adding 60,000 square meters of cleanroom capacity to reach about 93,000 square meters. Customer commitments have already surpassed the 33,000 square meters planned for Phase 1, which is now fully committed. The expansion supports strategic partnerships with TSMC and NVIDIA, including a 10-year advanced packaging agreement with TSMC and a multi-year NVIDIA partnership for AI infrastructure. Phase 2 construction is expected to begin in late 2027 and complete by the end of 2029. Amkor faces competition from Intel's EMIB-T technology and FormFactor's SmartMatrix for HBM4 testing. Shares have gained 28.4% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 and 2027 earnings is $2.60 and $2.72 per share, respectively.

Advanced Micro Devices stock rose 3% to $521.59 after CFO Jean Hu raised the AI chip total addressable market forecast to $2 trillion to $3 trillion by 2030, up from a prior $2 trillion ceiling. Hu also confirmed TSMC as AMD's primary wafer supplier, dismissing speculation about Intel Foundry, which continues to absorb a $2.1 billion operating loss. AMD's fiscal 2027 EPS estimates have climbed to $15.45 from $12.96 over the past 90 days, with 33 upward analyst revisions, yet the stock trades at 129 times trailing earnings. Intel ticked up 1% to $105.76, while the iShares Semiconductor ETF gained 0.8% to $532.50, underscoring the narrow, company-specific nature of the move.

OpenAI is expanding cooperation with Samsung Electronics across semiconductors and enterprise AI services, with joint research on next-generation chips at the center of the relationship, according to Reuters. Speaking at a Seoul press conference on Wednesday, Harrison Kim, General Manager of OpenAI Korea, said that chip development was one area where the two companies had achieved meaningful progress together, though he declined to provide further details. Kim also described Samsung as one of the largest-scale deployments of ChatGPT globally, with employees in South Korea and overseas using the platform across research, marketing, and sales. OpenAI said that the number of ChatGPT Enterprise users across South Korean businesses and institutions had grown roughly 28 times by late August compared with the same point the prior year, and that as of late last year, no country outside the United States had more paying ChatGPT subscribers than South Korea. Kim noted that the growing sophistication of AI hardware would keep pushing up demand for memory chips, and that working closely with South Korean semiconductor suppliers had become a core focus for OpenAI's office in the country. Last year, Samsung and SK Hynix signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI's Stargate data center project. OpenAI unveiled its first custom AI chip, called Jalapeno, in June, built with Broadcom and produced at TSMC facilities. Samsung has also been shipping samples of its HBM4E high-bandwidth memory chip to major global customers, becoming the first to distribute the next-generation AI memory product, which is used in AI accelerators including Nvidia's Rubin and Google's Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit. On the enterprise side, Samsung announced in June that employees in its Device eXperience division had been approved to use ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. OpenAI expects AI adoption to accelerate following the September 4 launch of GPT-6 Astra.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has begun to generate real applications and revenue at the enterprise level, creating a chain of positive impacts from software and cloud to semiconductors. Yuanta Securities noted that AI adoption is transforming software costs into cloud revenue, with companies like Snowflake, Salesforce, and ServiceNow benefiting from AI agents, while NVIDIA is expanding its moat by controlling the source through Hugging Face. However, SEMICON Taiwan 2026 highlighted bottlenecks, such as TSMC's demand for chip-making equipment nearly doubling in six months, and memory issues that forced Google to reuse DDR4. The Asian supply chain is fully benefiting, with South Korea's semiconductor exports surging 209% year-over-year. Earnings from Dell, Broadcom, Snowflake, Credo, and Palo Alto Networks reflect strong demand, such as Dell's record-high AI server orders at $60.9 billion and Broadcom's AI revenue growing 221%.

Qualcomm, Intel, Amkor, Nova, and FormFactor shares traded up in the afternoon session after Qualcomm announced a multi-generational product collaboration with Amazon Web Services to develop custom AI data center infrastructure, while ASML, TSMC, and Intel achieved key milestones in next-generation chip manufacturing. Qualcomm's partnership with AWS focuses on co-designing successive generations of custom AI chips for high-performance inference and data center workloads, aiming to strengthen AWS's internal hardware ecosystem, reduce operating costs, and improve energy efficiency. Simultaneously, ASML and TSMC announced a joint initiative to transition from traditional 6-inch photomasks to larger 12-inch formats, targeting a pilot line by 2031 and full production by 2033, which will expand the print field and reduce manufacturing costs. Additionally, Intel Foundry and ASML confirmed that Intel has processed over one million wafers on its Intel 18A node using High NA EUV equipment. These coordinated advancements boosted investor confidence in sub-2-nanometer chip designs and next-generation AI infrastructure. Among the stocks, Intel jumped 9.5%, Amkor and FormFactor each rose 6.3%, Nova gained 3.7%, and Qualcomm advanced 3.3%.

Intel led a broad semiconductor advance on Tuesday, with shares jumping 8% as investors weighed a potential CPU price increase and a fresh analyst upgrade. Northland Securities lifted Intel to Outperform from Market Perform and assigned a $120 price target, citing an ongoing server processor shortage and potential benefits from Intel's work with Tesla on the Terafab semiconductor project. Qualcomm also gained 4% after entering a deal with Amazon to develop next-generation AI data-center infrastructure, providing Amazon with warrants for up to 25 million shares at $161.26 each. AMD climbed 6%, extending the semiconductor rally after recently retreating from its June record close, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing added 2.5% following a bullish view from Stifel. Broadcom rose 3% after its latest earnings outlook prompted several Wall Street firms to raise ratings or price targets, even as the broader market traded lower.

Intel shares climbed 5% to $101 after Intel Foundry and ASML confirmed that more than one million wafers have been processed on High-NA EUV equipment, including production layers of Intel's Core Ultra processors code-named Panther Lake, a milestone that puts Intel years ahead of rivals. ASML rose 3% to $1,773, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing gained 3% to $438, both benefiting from AI-driven demand. Samsung plans to adopt High-NA EUV for DRAM by 2028, and TSMC for advanced nodes by 2030, while Intel's Q2 2026 revenue rose 25.4% to $16.13 billion, its strongest growth in 15 years. ASML raised its full-year 2026 sales outlook to between €43 billion and €45 billion, and Intel Foundry booked $5.765 billion in Q2 revenue, up 31% year over year, despite a $2.1 billion operating loss. A separate factor was President Trump's social media post claiming stock gains, which may have influenced flows, but analysts caution that Intel's 172% year-to-date gain already reflects heavy optimism.

ASML Holding NV rose 2.91% in premarket trading after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics committed to its High NA EUV lithography systems, which cost about $400 million each. TSMC, which had previously been cautious about the cost, will begin using the systems in 2030, while Samsung will start in 2028 for memory production, joining Intel Corp. TSMC alone accounts for roughly 16% of ASML's revenue, according to Bloomberg data. The companies also agreed to shift photomasks from the 6-inch standard to 12-inch versions, a change that ASML's chief technology officer Marco Pieters said could boost High NA throughput by 40%. TSMC and ASML plan a test line for 12-inch masks by 2031, with production use on High NA tools by 2033.

ASML Holding NV's next-generation High-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography technology is gaining adoption among major chipmakers, with Intel already using it in production and TSMC and Samsung preparing to follow. The technology enables printing smaller and more complex features on advanced chips, which is increasingly critical as AI processors grow larger and more intricate. Intel is the furthest along, employing High-NA EUV for certain layers of its 18A process, while TSMC is expected to bring it into production later this decade and Samsung is also preparing for wider adoption. ASML remains the sole commercial-scale supplier of EUV systems, giving it a unique position in the AI-driven semiconductor boom. The key question now is how quickly TSMC and Samsung transition High-NA EUV from testing to high-volume manufacturing.

ASML Holding announced that Samsung Electronics, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Intel are moving forward with its latest High-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment, strengthening the outlook for next-generation AI chips. Samsung plans to begin using High-NA systems for computer memory by 2028, while TSMC will adopt the technology from 2030, and Intel Foundry continues to use it in high-volume manufacturing. The companies are also collaborating with ASML on a shift from 6-inch to 12-inch photomasks, which could improve productivity and lower costs. ASML's chief technology officer, Marco Pieters, said the larger masks could increase High-NA machine throughput by 40 percent. TSMC's adoption is particularly significant as it accounts for about 16 percent of ASML's revenue, according to Bloomberg data.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) rose nearly 3% to $428.91 on Monday, as the world's advanced-chip factory leverages its semiconductor investments to strengthen ties with the United States and Europe. The company's Arizona expansion has grown to $265 billion after an additional $100 billion commitment, covering 12 American facilities, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. TSMC's second-quarter results showed $40.2 billion in revenue, a 67.7% gross margin, and a 60.3% operating margin, providing the financial firepower for this push. However, at $428.91, the stock trades 19.35% above its GF Value estimate of $359.38, leaving little room for error as TSMC must prove it can replicate its manufacturing success overseas without sacrificing its extraordinary margins.