TradingKey - On July 13, Eastern Time, Intel ( INTC) shares fell to a near one-month low. As of press time, the stock was down 4.29% to $105.13. It is reported that Intel's competitor TSMC ( TSM) announced its June revenue data. Data showed that its consolidated revenue for the month reached NT$442.68 billion, representing a significant year-on-year increase of 67.9%. For the first six months, TSMC's total consolidated revenue reached approximately NT$2.40 trillion, up 35.6% compared to the same period last year.
[Source: TradingView]
BofA Securities noted in its latest research report that TSMC's demand for the second and third quarters remains solid, and its gross margin is expected to remain resilient during the ramp-up of 2nm mass production. The firm expects TSMC's sales to grow by 12% quarter-on-quarter in the second quarter of 2026, and potentially by 10% to 15% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter, benefiting from high-performance computing (HPC) product updates and price hikes at the beginning of 2026.
The firm stated that, supported by favorable exchange rates, capacity utilization, and pricing factors, which are partially offset by the dilution effect of 2nm mass production concentrated in the second half of 2026 and higher summer electricity bills, TSMC's gross margin is likely to stabilize at around 67% to 68% in the third quarter (compared to market and buy-side expectations of 68% to 70%).
Against the backdrop where hyperscalers need to raise funds to further increase AI infrastructure spending amid an environment of component cost inflation, the firm stated that TSMC's commentary on the sustainability of AI investments and its capital expenditure commitments for the coming years could serve as a bellwether. Structurally, the firm will monitor its capacity expansion strategy and how it balances meeting customer demand (due to backend competition from Intel) with business cyclicality during industry downturns.
On the other hand, Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, recently stated that the logic behind the recovery in CPU demand is clear, but caution is still warranted. Although AI agents and reinforcement learning are driving up CPU demand, the sell-side has overpriced this, and CPU growth is mainly driven by historical 'catch-up buying,' with its absolute value in AI servers still far below that of GPUs.
He stated that reinforcement learning requires a large number of CPUs to run environmental validation, and agentic inference requires models to frequently call tools and interact with the real world—operations that are highly dependent on CPU computing power. Meanwhile, because of the massive shipments of AI chips over the past few years, the matching CPUs have been severely insufficient, and the market is currently in a concentrated catch-up phase, from which ARM, Intel, and AMD have all benefited, and Nvidia's Vera CPU has also given a $20 billion revenue guidance.
He warned that once the historical backlogs are cleared, only incremental demand will remain, and demand will return to normal. In terms of absolute value, a single Blackwell chip costs about $50,000, while a CPU costs about $5,000; even if CPUs are configured in higher ratios, the dollar amount is still far below that of AI accelerator chips. "Memory and AI accelerator chips are the bulk of the market. The CPU is experiencing a re-rating after being undervalued and is now more reasonably priced, but it will not grow faster than AI chips indefinitely."
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