TSMC sold a record $46.7 billion of chips in the third quarter as demand for Nvidia, AMD and other AI processors continued to outrun expectations.
Revenue reached NT$1.49 trillion, up 50% from a year earlier and above the NT$1.46 trillion analyst consensus.
September alone contributed NT$511.86 billion, up 54.6%. The numbers beat TSMC’s own quarterly guidance of $44.6 billion to $45.8 billion.
Yet with the company now worth about $2.1 trillion, the harder question is whether earnings can keep rising fast enough to justify a stock already trading near record levels.
TSMC is still beating an AI boom Wall Street already expected
TSMC is expected to report about NT$740.8 billion of net profit when full results arrive on October 15, roughly 64% more than a year earlier.
That means revenue growth is still translating into unusually powerful earnings growth rather than being absorbed entirely by higher costs.
“Another round of consensus earnings upgrades likely to come,” Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote this week.
He expects more than 40% revenue growth into 2027, supported by AI compute, agentic AI, co-packaged optics and the broader ramp of TSMC’s N2 process.
That is the central defence of the stock’s valuation. TSMC may look expensive against today’s earnings, but the denominator keeps changing as analysts lift forecasts.
AI demand is spreading beyond Nvidia GPUs
AI infrastructure increasingly requires advanced CPUs, networking chips, custom accelerators and next-generation process nodes, all of which can flow through TSMC’s factories.
Goldman Sachs recently raised its Taiwan-listed price target to NT$3,300 and maintained a Buy rating. The bank expects US-dollar revenue to grow 42% in 2026 and 36.9% in 2027.
Goldman highlighted stronger server-CPU demand linked to agentic AI as an important change, while also lifting its 2027 and 2028 capital-expenditure forecasts to $85 billion and $98 billion.
That spending matters because it shows TSMC is preparing for demand across more of the AI stack, not simply one product category.
AMD chief executive Lisa Su has reinforced that argument, saying the company expects to expand chip supply substantially and needs more advanced wafer capacity over the next several years.
Investors already know TSMC is winning
TSMC’s Taipei shares recently reached a record NT$2,585, while its US ADR has also traded near record territory.
The Taipei-listed stock fell 1.35% before Thursday’s revenue release despite expectations for another record quarter. That shows that record sales themselves are becoming less surprising.
Concord Securities analyst Kerry Huang captured the change in sentiment as Taiwan’s market approached a major milestone.
“As the 50,000-point mark neared, some investors sold shares to lock in gains,” Huang told the Taipei Times.
He also warned that rising US Treasury yields could pressure expensive technology companies by increasing funding costs and weighing on valuations.
The US 10-year yield recently reached around 5.34%, its highest since 2002.
Investors will be watching October 15 for further earnings upgrades, N2 execution, gross-margin durability and evidence that Nvidia, AMD, Apple and hyperscalers are still increasing AI investment fast enough to keep utilisation and pricing elevated.
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