Nvidia Surpasses Apple as TSMC’s Top Client in 2026 Chip Wars

Nvidia just pulled off the semiconductor coup of the decade—dethroning Apple as TSMC's number-one customer. The AI-driven demand for cutting-edge silicon has reshuffled the entire tech food chain.

The New King of the Fab

For years, Apple's relentless iPhone upgrade cycle guaranteed its pole position at TSMC. No more. Nvidia's data center GPUs—the engines behind the generative AI explosion—are now consuming more of TSMC's most advanced production capacity than anything coming out of Cupertino. It's a pure power shift: compute for AI is outpacing compute for consumer gadgets.

Why This Isn't Just a Supplier Change

This isn't a simple vendor list update. It signals where the real money in tech is flowing. Capital expenditure is chasing AI infrastructure, not just the next slightly thinner phone. TSMC's production lines are literally being retooled by market forces. Every wafer dedicated to an H100 is one not going to an A-series chip—a tangible reallocation of the world's most critical manufacturing resource.

The Ripple Effect

The implications are massive. Supply chains are bending. Pricing power is shifting. For Apple, it means competing for capacity it once took for granted. For the broader tech ecosystem, it confirms that the AI boom has a concrete, physical footprint—one built on a foundation of advanced semiconductors that are suddenly in desperately short supply. Wall Street analysts, of course, saw this coming—right after it happened.

One era of tech dominance ends, another accelerates. The chips aren't just down; they're being hoarded by the new power player.

Nvidia’s spending now beats Apple’s by billions

Ben Bajarin, who analyzes tech at Creative Strategies, said Nvidia is set to bring in $33 billion in revenue for TSMC this year. That’s about 22% of the foundry’s total. Apple, on the other hand, is expected to bring in just $27 billion, or around 18%. “The scale of this drastically changed,” Ben said. “A couple years ago, you could just see how much more capacity Nvidia was demanding from TSMC.”

TSMC doesn’t rank its 522 customers in public, but it did admit back in March that one customer brought in 22% of its revenue and the second biggest brought in 12%. That was the first big hint that Nvidia had taken the lead.

This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, demand for AI chips exploded. Nvidia’s chips are now used in tons of data centers. The company is behind most of the AI accelerators out there, and that demand pushed TSMC’s high-performance computing sales up to 55% of revenue in the last quarter. In 2022, that number was 40%.

Nvidia’s chips cost more and demand more

Part of why Nvidia now dominates is that its chips are huge and complicated to make. Compared to what Apple makes, Nvidia’s hardware takes more time, more effort, and more money. That alone boosts how much TSMC earns from them.

In February, Nvidia is expected to report $213 billion in sales for fiscal 2026, which ends this month. That’s a 66% increase. Meanwhile, Apple’s sales for fiscal 2025, which ended in September, only grew by 6.4%.

Apple’s still pushing though. They’re reporting earnings this Thursday and expecting 12% revenue growth. Samik Chatterjee from JPMorgan raised his price target on Apple to $315, saying the stock could still rise 27%. He pointed to stronger iPhone 17 demand and lower expenses. Apple stock is up 11% over the past year, but still behind the S&P 500, which gained 13.4% in that time.

Samik said memory prices have been hurting Apple’s profit margins, but he expects that pressure to ease. He also said the company’s Services revenue could rise 7%, even though that’s less than the 14% Apple aimed for. Still, he thinks they’ve got other ways to grow.

TSMC is still the most dominant foundry out there. They work with almost everyone; AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and more. Research group TrendForce said TSMC owns 70% of the global chip manufacturing market.

Intel, trying to play catch-up, wants to make advanced chips in the U.S. But they still don’t have a lead customer. Their stock dropped 13% on Thursday after giving weak production forecasts.

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