台积电7月销售额同比增45%，AI硬件需求强劲

So TSMC reporting a 45% rise 45% rise in monthly sales in a sign, of course, of sustained demand for AI hardware amid that market volatility that we saw that was so pronounced in July. The report comes after TSMC raised its spending projection for the year last month when it faced questions on whether its AI related expenditure would deliver meaningful returns. We're joined now by Bloomberg senior strategist Neil Campling.

Neil, walk us through the numbers from TSMC. We are seeing a bit of a lift then for European names on the back of this. It seems to be red positive by the market so far. Yeah. So 45% for the monthly sales data. Analysts are at about 47% for the full quarter when it comes out. To put that in perspective for a trillion dollar company, it's pretty high growth rate, and it's on track to be the highest top line number since q three twenty twenty two.

So the best in four years. So that's a they're very supportive of that helping the chip equipment stocks today in Europe. And for those chip equipment stocks, let's remember that we have the likes of Applied Materials, ASML's closest comp, really, reporting results later this week. And we'll get other AI clues from other earnings in The US this week. The main So does TSMC make chips for? Just because this is the critical thing here, really, isn't TSMC are making are making AI AI chips for NVIDIA.

They're making the chips for AMD. They also make the chips for, you know, the smartphones for for for Apple. So they're not the memory trade, which is where there's a lot more volatility around. These are the core logic, the the the brains that go into the AI systems and that go into Why are getting less volatility there than we're getting in the memory? Because memory is more cyclical over the course of, longer cycles.

And also in memory, they're all raising their own CapEx forecasts. Yeah. And that's actually gonna impact in terms of the supply side dynamics and probably pricing going forward. Meanwhile, AI tokens have come down about 40% from the highs. So the actual use of the AI tokens is getting a lot cheaper, and there's a disconnect between memory pricing and token pricing at the moment. And I think my market participants are betting that the sort of supply going up in memory means a pricing for memory, DRAM in particular, will come down over time.

Yeah. Over time is is the question, isn't it? Over over what kind of time frame. TSMC, the the really cost in terms of sales from other foundries, the likes of Samsung, it's is this do we expect Samsung to perform in a in similarly well in terms of the sales numbers they're seeing, particularly when it comes to the GPUs? We certainly would because Samsung also does not just memory, but logic as well, and it has a leading edge fab out in The US, giving it a good local footprint in The US market.

So TSMC and Samsung are the two leading logic foundries that should be benefiting substantially from this high demand and these high growth kind of estimates that are out in the marketplace. So it's positive for both, and definitely, I think investors prefer that to the memory cyclicality. Okay. So the big question around what is the AI trade back on? Because it was off for a while, and it feels like it's back on again.

Is it back on again? It was off for a while while you were sort of selling yourself out at Dun and Cornwall, And I think part of it is we got we got the accelerating growth coming out from Microsoft. So to justify that CapEx, we had good accelerating growth coming from AWS, from Amazon. So there's definitely some comfort from there. But the big question about when we're gonna see these big returns on the invested capital from these high skies does remain to be seen.

Not all of them can benefit from the AI build out, but there's certainly some encouraging, signs in the meantime.