Zero One Daily Intelligence Brief — June 4, 2026

TSMC sees no capex plateau as Broadcom's steady AI guide cools the chip rally

Top Market Signals

TSMC vows rising dividends and sees no capex peak

TSMC (2330 TT) chairman Wei Che-chia used the annual shareholder meeting to project confidence across every line investors care about, telling holders that capital spending has no plateau in sight, that dividends will only keep rising, and that gross margin is heading higher.

According to TechNews and CNA reporting from the Hsinchu meeting, Wei said 2026 capex is now leaning toward the high end of the US$52-56bn range, at US$56bn, and that he sees no signal yet to stop expanding. Asked directly when the spending "plateau" would arrive, he said he did not know, because demand forecasts from customers and "customers' customers" point to growth running higher for the next several years. He told shareholders that if they planned to buy the stock, they should keep buying, noting the share price has climbed from NT$950 in 2025 to NT$2,450.

On returns, Wei was unusually firm: dividends will "definitely keep growing" and the board will never consider a cut, holding at least flat in an extreme downturn and rising in normal conditions. The payout grew 30% in each of the past two years, ahead of inflation. CFO Wendell Huang added that management has studied buybacks repeatedly but concluded a steadily rising dividend is the better long-term support for the stock, so no buyback is planned.

On margins and competition, Wei said group gross margin has moved from a historical 40-50% range to above 60%, guided 2Q26 to a 65.5-67.5% band, and lifted the long-term target toward 56% or higher. On the threat from Intel 18A and Samsung, he was blunt: TSMC has never lacked competitors in 30 to 40 years, and its strategy is simply "to keep winning." He also rebutted the worry that TSMC is repeating Intel's EUV mistake by skipping High-NA EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography at a higher numerical aperture), confirming TSMC has already bought the tools for R&D and will move them into production once the cost comes down.

Linked stocks: 2330 TT, INTC US, 005930 KS

Sources: 魏哲家：台積電會一直努力贏三星英特爾, 台積電對未來成長深具信心, 股利一定一直成長

Broadcom's held AI guide sinks the stock despite a beat

Broadcom (AVGO US) fell almost 12% after hours even though it beat on earnings and guided current-quarter revenue above consensus, because CEO Hock Tan left the closely-watched long-term AI chip target unchanged and narrowed the company's scope to "chips only."

According to CNBC and MarketWatch reporting, FY2Q26 (February to April) revenue rose 48% YoY to US$22.19bn and non-GAAP EPS reached US$2.44, against US$2.40 expected. The FY3Q26 guide of about US$29.4bn (+84% YoY) actually topped the US$28.53bn consensus. AI revenue doubled YoY to US$10.8bn in the quarter and was guided to roughly US$16bn next quarter, about triple the year-ago level.

The disappointment was about what did not change. Hock Tan reaffirmed, but declined to raise, the target of more than US$100bn in AI semiconductor revenue for the fiscal year, saying only that the momentum should extend into FY2027. He also flagged a strategy shift: Broadcom will supply "chips only" going forward, rather than the full AI integrated systems it had previously promised some customers. He named six core custom-silicon customers, including Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI.

The read-across is to expectations rather than fundamentals. With the stock having run hard into the print, a quarter that merely met the bar on its highest-profile metric was enough to trigger a sharp repricing, and Asian AI-supply names traded softer the next session in sympathy. The custom-ASIC demand story itself, anchored by four of the largest AI model builders, was not contradicted by anything in the quarter.

Linked stocks: AVGO US, GOOGL US, META US

Sources: 博通AI晶片銷售額預估令華爾街失望，盤後股價下殺

Memory shortage now squeezing cars and consumer goods

The memory price surge has moved from an investor story to a supply-chain emergency, with US industry groups warning Washington that the AI data-center buildout is draining memory away from cars, retail and medical devices.

According to Reuters reporting relayed by TechNews, trade bodies for automakers, retailers, medical-device makers and the cable industry sent a joint letter to the US government warning that the AI-driven memory imbalance is pushing end prices sharply higher and crowding out consumer-product capacity. The letter argued the squeeze will spread to American households if memory makers keep prioritizing high-margin HBM (high-bandwidth memory) over commodity DRAM, and urged the government to act before conditions worsen.

The pricing data behind the warning is steep. Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore wrote that DRAM has become the main bottleneck in the AI infrastructure cycle, that there is "no quick fix" for the shortage, and that the supply-constrained market could persist for two to three years or longer. His model has DRAM contract prices up 40% in the March-to-May quarter and rising another 15% in the June-to-August quarter.

On the back of that pricing, Moore raised his estimates for the two most exposed names, lifting Micron's (MU US) 2027 EPS forecast by 48% and SanDisk's (SNDK US) by 24%. Both stocks closed at record highs on the day, with Micron up 1.45% to US$1,079.57 and SanDisk up 6.71% to US$1,831.50. The signal for the broader market is that memory tightness has now reached the point where downstream industries are lobbying governments, which historically marks a cycle running hot rather than one near its end.

Linked stocks: MU US, SNDK US, 000660 KS

Sources: 車商、零售業者警告美國記憶體短缺正衝擊價格, 大摩看好美光、SanDisk上調目標價

Intel's CFO concedes 18A overreach, leans on 14A

Intel (INTC US) finance chief David Zinsner admitted that the company "bit off more than it could chew" with its 18A process, a rare public concession that frames the next node, 14A, as the cleaner bet.

According to TechNews coverage of Zinsner's remarks at Bank of America's 2026 global technology conference, 18A's delays came partly from chasing performance and yield while pushing too many initiatives at once, overloading the team. The new approach under CEO Lip-Bu Tan is to stabilize performance first, then grind yield higher month by month, with global operations chief Naga Chandrasekaran assigned to the effort. Intel is also sharing more data with equipment suppliers to find yield gains, a cultural shift Zinsner said is already showing results.

The financial target is specific: Intel wants 18A yield at a level that produces strong gross margin, and Zinsner said that goal is now ahead of the original schedule, achievable by the end of 2027. On 14A, he argued the node reuses the GAA (gate-all-around) transistor and backside power delivery introduced with 18A, which makes its development relatively easier, and that at the same maturity stage 14A already leads 18A on performance and yield.

On demand, Zinsner said AI workloads are shifting from training toward inference, which is driving a large increase in data-center CPU demand, and that the near-term constraint is supply rather than orders. Intel plans to sign more long-term agreements locking price and volume so it can plan capacity more precisely. The candor cuts both ways: it acknowledges how much ground 18A lost, while setting a measurable yield milestone investors can track.

Linked stocks: INTC US, 2330 TT, AVGO US

Sources: 英特爾承認18A製程步伐邁太大

Trend Micro brings Anthropic's Claude into security operations

Trend Micro (4994 TT) is moving frontier AI into the core of vulnerability management, with its TrendAI unit partnering Anthropic to evaluate Claude Opus 4.8 for detecting, prioritizing and fixing software flaws.

According to TechNews reporting, TrendAI has joined Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program, which licenses qualified organizations to run frontier AI models in defensive scenarios. Trend Micro plans to use Claude Opus 4.8 to help engineers and security teams understand the context around a vulnerability, judge how exploitable it is, weigh the business impact, and accelerate remediation including virtual patching.

The stated ambition is to turn vulnerability management from a static scanning process into a faster, context-aware risk workflow, feeding the insights into the company's Vision One platform for security operations and application-security teams. TrendAI operations chief framed the partnership as building an "AI security governance" layer spanning visibility, observability and action across AI usage, prompts, tool calls and API execution.

The wider signal is that established security vendors are now embedding third-party frontier models directly into their products rather than relying only on in-house engines, a route that gives them advanced reasoning without the cost of training comparable models themselves. It also extends Anthropic's enterprise footprint into defensive cybersecurity, a field where model reasoning maps closely to the work analysts already do.

Linked stocks: 4994 TT

Sources: 趨勢科技TrendAI攜手Anthropic導入Claude Opus 4.8

AI power demand becomes Taiwan's hottest rotation

NVIDIA (NVDA US) chief Jensen Huang's warning that "Taiwan needs more power" has turned electricity supply into the island's sharpest market theme, driving money into the few listed companies that can actually generate and sell it.

According to Economic Daily News reporting, Huang's line at a Taiwan event sent power-related stocks higher, but the industry's own read is that the shortage is in generation capacity, not power equipment. That distinction pushed buyers toward paper makers, which run cogeneration plants as a byproduct of their recycling and waste-treatment processes and can feed surplus electricity into the grid.

The moves were large. Cheng Loong (1904 TT) hit a NT$22.3 limit-up, while Chung Hwa Pulp (1905 TT) and Yuen Foong Yu (1907 TT) each rose more than 6% and Long Chen (1909 TT) added about 4%. Cheng Loong's Zhubei biomass cogeneration plant already generates about 126m kWh a year, and the company plans Taiwan's largest biomass cogeneration system at its Houli site by 2029.

The signal sits underneath the entire AI capex story. As AI data centers scale, the binding constraint is increasingly electricity rather than chips, and a market that has spent two years bidding up compute is now starting to price the power that compute requires. Whether the cogeneration trade holds depends on how quickly Taiwan can add real generation, but the rotation shows investors treating power as the next bottleneck to own.

Linked stocks: 1904 TT, 1907 TT, NVDA US

Sources: 黃仁勳喊台灣需要更多電力，造紙三雄汽電共生受惠

先聲 First Word — Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources

ASRock Rack wins 587-server Blackwell order for Thailand AI data center

ASRock Rack (7711 TT), the server unit of ASRock, will supply 587 NVIDIA B200 AI servers carrying 4,696 Blackwell GPUs to Japan's Data Section for an AI data center near Bangkok, supporting Thailand's sovereign-AI strategy. The order extends ASRock Rack's run of AI-server wins into Southeast Asian sovereign-AI buildouts, with deliveries expected from the second half of 2026. (04 Jun 2026) Source: 永擎獲Data Section 587台AI伺服器訂單

Pan Jit rides a second power-chip price hike toward IDM status

Pan Jit (2481 TT) is being upgraded by analysts after Infineon and STMicroelectronics issued a second 2026 price hike on power components and as Pan Jit's CSP-certified power MOSFETs lift its AI revenue mix. April sales hit NT$1.29bn, a record monthly second-high, and the AI share of revenue is forecast to reach about 15% in 2026 from roughly 11% in 1Q26. Its in-house 4, 6 and 8-inch fabs give it IDM-style cost control as input prices climb. (04 Jun 2026) Source: 強茂功率元件漲價，AI營收占比拚15%

Genius Electronic Optical hits a two-year high on automotive optics

Genius Electronic Optical (3406 TT) rose 6.65% to NT$665, a two-year closing high, after disclosing progress in automotive optical components with customers placing advance orders and demand expected to surge in 2027 and 2028. The move signals that vehicle optics, long a slower lane than smartphone lenses, is becoming a credible second growth engine for Taiwan's lens makers. (04 Jun 2026) Source: 揚明光車用光學元件放量　股價站上2年新高

Qisda group shows rack-scale AI infrastructure at Computex

Qisda (2352 TT) showcased a rack-scale AI infrastructure solution at Computex 2026 with affiliates Unizyx (3564 TT) and Alpha Networks (3380 TT), combining two-phase liquid cooling for racks above 100kW, AMD EPYC compute and 400G to 1.6T switching. The BenQ-Qisda group is repositioning from a thermal-technology supplier into a full AI-infrastructure integrator. (04 Jun 2026) Source: 佳世達攜其陽、明泰展示機櫃級AI解決方案