Semiconductor stocks extend gains in premarket trading. TSMC rose 9%; Arm rose 4%; Nvidia rose 3%; AMD, Broadcom rose 2.7%; Micron rose 2%.
TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said on Thursday it expects strong growth in its business to be sustained as it reported a forecast-beating 54% jump in quarterly profit due to soaring demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI).
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the dominant producer of advanced chips used in AI applications whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, has benefited from a surge towards AI across a spectrum of industries.
At its quarterly earnings call on Thursday, TSMC said it expects capital expenditure for this year at slightly higher than $30 billion, compared with a previous forecast of $30 billion-$32 billion, as it races to expand production.
The chipmaker is spending billions of dollars building new factories overseas, including $65 billion on three plants in the U.S. state of Arizona, though it has said most manufacturing will remain in Taiwan.
It said on Thursday it expects its first fab in Arizona to see volume production in 2025, while its second fab there should start volume production in 2028. It forecasts the third Arizona fab to begin volume production by the end of the decade.
It forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $26.1 billion-$26.9 billion, up from $19.62 billion in the same period of 2023.
The bellwether for the chip industry reported earlier on Thursday a net profit of T$325.3 billion ($10.11 billion) for the quarter ended Sept. 30, its highest for any quarter, compared with the T$300.2 billion predicted by an LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 22 analysts.
TSMC, Asia's most valuable publicly listed company, said third-quarter revenue rose 36% year-on-year to $23.5 billion, better than the company's previous forecast of $22.4 billion to $23.2 billion. The company last week announced third-quarter revenue in Taiwan dollars, coming in at T$759.69 billion.
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