AT&S and Marvell Expand AI Substrate Collaboration at Kulim Site

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing anchored a new Kaohsiung industrial park aimed at tightening the link between advanced-packaging development, testing and workforce training, sending its U.S.-listed shares up approximately 0.6% to $447.86. TSMC plans to occupy two buildings at the site, including a laboratory and training center, with operations targeted for the fourth quarter of 2029. Industrial facilities will cover 53.6 hectares of the 88.7-hectare park, roughly 60% of the total area, giving equipment and materials suppliers space to test technologies closer to TSMC's qualification process. The company disclosed no investment figure, output target or customer commitment, so the project should not be mistaken for an immediate capacity surge. At $447.86, TSMC trades 23.32% above its GF Value estimate of $363.17.

Arm Holdings shares rose 17% to $323 after CEO Rene Haas told CNBC that demand for the company's technology was off the charts and that he is increasingly convinced Arm can surpass its $2 billion revenue target for its developing AGI CPU business. That goal has moved quickly: Arm began in March with an initial target of $1 billion, raised it to $2 billion in May, and by September Haas said the pipeline was above that level. Nvidia's Vera CPU, Google's Axion, Amazon's Graviton5, and Microsoft's Azure Cobalt all use Arm-based computation, tying the company to the expanding trend of CPUs paired with AI accelerators. Haas also pointed to supply restrictions on wafers, substrates and testing capacity that could take years to work through, a problem that nonetheless shows demand is outstripping available capacity. The larger story is Arm's effort to move away from its usual licensing arrangement and capture more value from the chips themselves, and Monday's surge suggests investors are increasingly focused on that opportunity.

TSMC spent $15.59 billion on capital expenditure in its June 2026 quarter, its largest quarterly outlay in the past eight quarters and about 42% above the $10.98 billion spent in the prior quarter, as the company raised its 2026 capital budget for a third time this year, from $52 billion to $56 billion in January, to the high end of that range in April, and to $60 billion to $64 billion in July. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, CFO Wendell Huang guided third quarter gross margin down 170 basis points to 66%, citing 3 to 4 percentage points of dilution from the steep ramp of TSMC's 2 nanometer process, even as the June 2026 quarter's gross margin reached 67.72%, its highest in two years and consistent with the 67.7% figure cited by CEO C.C. Wei. Huang said TSMC generated about $24.5 billion in operating cash flow that quarter, enough to cover the $15.59 billion in CapEx and roughly $4.9 billion in dividends without new borrowing. TSMC is trading at 22.46 times forward normalized earnings, close to its 22.41 times two year average and well below the 29.65 times high in that range, after a mid September selloff tied to AI safety warnings from Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman rather than anything specific to TSMC. Institutional 13F filings dated June 30, 2026 show a split Street, with Coatue raising its TSMC stake 7.6% to 9.3 million ADRs and Situational Awareness lifting its position to 2.6 million shares, while Lone Pine cut its stake 92.7%, SoftBank cut 71.5%, and Viking Global cut 29%.