Zero One Investment Research Daily Intelligence Brief, July 17, 2026

TSMC guides FY26 growth past 40% and adds US$100bn to Arizona

Top Market Signals

TSMC lifts FY26 growth guide past 40%

TSMC (2330 TT) raised its FY26 US dollar revenue growth guide to slightly above 40%, the second raise this year from the near-30% pace set in January, and lifted FY26 capex to US$60bn to US$64bn. Its American depositary receipts still closed down 2.32% at US$409.74.

The quarter itself cleared every bar TSMC set for it. 2Q26 revenue was US$40.2bn, up 33.7% YoY and 12% QoQ, at the top of the US$39.0bn to US$40.2bn guide. Gross margin of 67.7% and operating margin of 60.3% both came in above the guided ranges, and net profit of NT$706.56bn rose 77.4% YoY. First-half EPS was NT$49.32.

The gross margin guide is the one line that steps down. TSMC guided 3Q26 gross margin to 65% to 67% at an assumed NT$32 per US dollar, below the 67.7% it just delivered. CFO Wendell Huang tied the step down to two costs: the 2nm ramp, which TSMC expects to dilute 2H26 gross margin by 3 to 4 percentage points through early depreciation and yield, and overseas fabs, which it expects to dilute by 2 to 3 points for the next several years and possibly 3 to 4 points after that.

The midpoint of 66% met the 66.2% consensus, and the ADR fell 2.32% anyway, against a Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down 4.29% on the tenth straight session of foreign selling. Morgan Stanley's semiconductor analyst said the shortfall against expectations was what pulled the shares back, while JPMorgan's Taiwan research head argued 3nm profitability and high utilization should hold margins at 67% to 69% in coming quarters.

The selling was already running when the raise arrived. Foreign investors sold Taiwan shares for a tenth straight session on 16 July, NT$48.33bn on the day and NT$453.46bn cumulatively, and their net short position in TAIEX futures reached more than 84,000 contracts. Korea's Kospi fell 6.37% and tripped a circuit breaker after the Bank of Korea raised rates again; the Nikkei fell 2.79%. TSMC was the exception during Taiwan hours, closing up 1.23% at NT$2,470 as buyers positioned into the call, worth about 238 index points and holding the TAIEX to a 6.61 point loss. The reversal came overnight, with TAIEX futures down more than 1,200 points and the ADR trading 4.5% lower pre-market.

Chairman C.C. Wei said AI demand could stay strong through 2029 and 2030, and that the gap between advanced-node demand and supply remains very large. TSMC's July revenue, due in early August, is the first monthly print against the new guide.

Linked stocks: 2330 TT, TSM US, NVDA US, AAPL US

Sources: 〈台積電法說〉二度上調全年展望、加碼美國投資 九大重點一文看懂, 台積電上季財報驚艷 寫五個新高 「雙率」同步飛越財測高標, 台積法說不如預期 台指夜盤重挫, AI推著走、美國政策加速走　台積投千億美元承載長遠優勢布局

TSMC adds US$100bn to Arizona, four more fabs

TSMC will invest another US$100bn in Arizona, taking its total committed US investment to US$265bn. Wei said the money buys four or more additional fabs for 2nm and more advanced nodes, plus advanced packaging.

Arizona already had six fabs, two advanced packaging plants and one R&D center planned. Adding four more turns the site into a full manufacturing cluster, which is what US policy has been reaching for since the CHIPS and Science Act. Supply-chain contacts put the gap the US spent years trying to close as leading-edge manufacturing capacity, since the design work was always there. President Trump has said he wants the US to hold 40% to 60% of global chip capacity.

Execution is running ahead of the pledge. The first Arizona fab is in volume production at yields on par with Taiwan's, the second is moving equipment in, and the third is under construction. Wei also committed to a new 3nm fab each in Taiwan, the US and Japan, and to converting some 5nm equipment to 3nm, while keeping 13 advanced fabs and packaging plants under construction in Taiwan. Taiwan's Executive Yuan responded that it will hold to three priorities: the largest manufacturing capacity, the most advanced technology, and the most complete ecosystem all stay on the island.

The cost of this shows up in the margin line for years. TSMC put overseas dilution at 2 to 3 percentage points annually with scope to widen to 3 to 4. That is the part of the 3Q26 margin guide that does not fade once the 2nm ramp matures. Supply-chain contacts told DigiTimes the shift reflects three forces at once, AI demand, US localization policy and foundry competition, and that overseas cost pressure on margin is unlikely to be a short-term matter.

Linked stocks: 2330 TT, TSM US, INTC US

Sources: 台積加碼美國千億美元 同步承諾繼續在台投資, 台積加碼3.2兆 美國再建4座晶圓廠, AI推著走、美國政策加速走　台積投千億美元承載長遠優勢布局

Powertech and Broadcom fund Singapore packaging

Powertech Technology (6239 TT), Taiwan's second-largest packaging and test house, will put US$400m into a Singapore joint venture with Broadcom (AVGO US) dedicated to panel-level advanced packaging. Broadcom will lead the venture with more than 50%, and Powertech will run operations and manufacturing.

Panel-level fan-out packaging, or FOPLP, builds chips on rectangular panels instead of round wafers, which wastes less area at the edges and suits the large AI accelerators, with their fast-rising input and output counts, that no longer fit efficiently on wafer-level lines. The new plant is scheduled to break ground at the end of 2026 and reach volume production in 2028, aimed at long-term demand for co-packaged optics, where the optical engine sits in the same package as the switch chip.

Two facts explain the timing. Powertech's Taiwan lines are already full, and the company says customer long-term demand has run above its expectations. The split that results is clean: Taiwan FOPLP capacity serves AMD, which invested in those lines earlier, and Singapore serves Broadcom, whose Asia headquarters is in the city. Broadcom is the second-largest chip designer after NVIDIA and holds the custom AI silicon accounts for Google, Meta and OpenAI. TrendForce puts ASIC-equipped AI servers at 27.8% of shipments this year, the highest since 2023 and growing faster than GPU servers.

Powertech has been building this position for a decade, and put up Taiwan's first FOPLP-dedicated site in 2018. It has done a single-customer joint venture once before, with Micron in Xi'an in 2014. The company says core technology and key intellectual property stay in Taiwan; terms still need regulatory approval, and its chairman is due to give more detail at the 28 July investor conference.

Linked stocks: 6239 TT, AVGO US, AMD US, 3711 TT

Sources: 力成攜博通 衝面板級封裝 斥資128億設星國合資公司, TechNews

TSMC puts its optical chip platform into production

TSMC confirmed for the first time that COUPE, its platform for putting optical and electronic circuits in one package, has entered production this year. It also laid out the A14 node family in full for the first time.

COUPE, short for Compact Universal Photonic Engine, bonds an electronic integrated circuit to a photonic one. Moving that conversion into the package cuts the loss involved in turning electrical signals into light and back, which raises bandwidth per watt. It is the enabling piece for co-packaged optics, the architecture that replaces pluggable transceivers as AI clusters outgrow copper between racks. Analysts cited by Commercial Times expect the platform's move into production to pull through demand at Taiwan's silicon photonics and high-speed optical component suppliers.

A14 enters risk production in 2027 and volume in 2028, using second-generation nanosheet transistors. Against 2nm, TSMC claims 10% to 15% more performance at the same power, or 25% to 30% less power at the same performance, with density up close to 20%; internal validation is showing near 90% of target device performance. A13 follows in 2029 with a 97% optical shrink that saves more than 6% of die area while staying compatible with A14 designs, and A12, also 2029, is the first node to carry Super Power Rail, which moves the power delivery network to the back of the wafer so it stops competing with signal wiring on the front.

Developing a node like A14, building the capacity and lifting it to volume now takes five to seven years end to end, Wei said, and he repeated that there are no shortcuts to it. Smartphone and high-performance computing customers are already taping out designs ahead of the original schedule.

Linked stocks: 2330 TT, NVDA US, AVGO US

Sources: 台積電A14、COUPE 雙龍搶鏡, TechNews

US seeks a share of Korea's chip windfall

Washington has argued in trade talks with Seoul that because US companies buy so much Korean memory, it should share in the "excess profits" that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are earning from the AI buildout, the Korea Times reported, citing an industry figure with knowledge of the talks.

Deputy US Trade Representative Rick Switzer put the argument to Korea's trade negotiator Yeo Han-koo last month, according to the report. The logic offered was symmetry: if Korean domestic suppliers are entitled to share in the windfall, US customers who fund it through their purchases should be too. A senior Korean government official confirmed to the paper that the US had raised the idea without giving detail. USTR, Commerce and Treasury did not respond to the paper; Korea's trade ministry said it was not aware of the matter.

The numbers behind the claim are large enough to explain the interest. Korea's semiconductor exports reached US$192.43bn in the first half, up 162.5% YoY and a record, of which US$26.4bn went to the US, up 91.3%. June alone was US$44.82bn, up 199.2% YoY, with US$6.49bn to the US, up 377.2%. Commerce Secretary Lutnick last week publicly called on both companies to build DRAM and NAND fabs in the US; neither has announced a leading-edge memory fab there.

Seoul officials pointed out that both firms already committed to US investment under last year's tariff agreement, and that industrial cooperation should rest on commercial logic. A parallel debate is running inside Korea over whether the two should share AI-era profits with domestic suppliers, and whether the public should see a return given the state resources put into chip infrastructure.

Linked stocks: 000660 KS, 005930 KS, MU US

Sources: 大傻眼？傳美方盯上三星、SK海力士 索要AI「超額利潤」

Japan backs Noetra with up to ¥1tn

Japan launched Noetra, a domestic AI developer funded by 44 companies including SoftBank, Sony Group, NEC and Honda, with government support of up to ¥1tn and a bulk purchase of about 27,500 of NVIDIA's newest Rubin chips.

The compute goes into a dedicated national AI center in Sakai, Osaka, targeted for 2028 at the earliest. Noetra plans to release a foundation model in FY2026 and extend it to handle images and speech, with a 2030 goal of a system that can understand, predict and reproduce real-world information for factories, robots and autonomous driving. Rather than compete with US and Chinese labs on frontier models, where both have spent far more and lead, Japan is aiming at general models for the manufacturing floor. Noetra's president said the point is to turn what Japanese industry knows into data an AI can learn from, and that this is the last chance to do it.

The industrial side moved the same day. Fujitsu began a joint business study with FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries to standardize robot control on NVIDIA's stack, with Cosmos as the world model underneath, for factory, logistics and medical use. Kawasaki Heavy is separately building an AI shipyard with NVIDIA at its Sakaide works in Kagawa, using digital twins of the yard plus AI agents across design, procurement, manufacturing and quality control, and developing quadruped robots that walk to a site and weld large structural parts. Jensen Huang, in Tokyo, described Japanese manufacturing know-how as a national treasure and said physical AI infrastructure should be built there.

The competitive frame is China, which has roughly four times Japan's installed base of industrial robots and a state-backed plan for more than 100 humanoid deployment cases. Noetra will open its models to Japanese companies under revised foreign-exchange and trade rules. The chips still come from NVIDIA.

Linked stocks: NVDA US, 9984 JT, 6954 JT, 7012 JT

Sources: 黃仁勳站台力挺　日本成立Noetra打造國產AI平台, 輝達攜手富士通與三大機器人巨頭打造「實體 AI」新標準，加速日本製造業轉型, 川崎重工傳攜手輝達 在日本打造配備機器人AI造船廠

先聲 First Word: Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources

Techman is NVIDIA's only Taiwanese Jetson Thor partner

Techman Robot (4585 TT) was the sole Taiwanese company named among NVIDIA's launch partners for the new Jetson Thor T3000 and T2000 robot computers, alongside 1X, Agile Robots, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, FANUC and Hitachi. Techman already runs its collaborative robots inside parent Quanta's automotive electronics plant in Germany, so the partner slot points at a working supply relationship. (17 Jul 2026)

Source: 達明衝機器人 牽緊輝達 入列 Jetson Thor 新模組合作夥伴

ChipMOS closes at a record on memory strength

ChipMOS Technologies (8150 TT) rose 7.4% to NT$122.5 on 16 July, hitting limit-up intraday before easing, for its highest close on record, as memory test momentum built into 2H26 and new AI projects in silicon photonics and logic testing entered the mix. For a memory-centric test house, silicon photonics work is the diversification that has been missing, and it lands the same day TSMC put its own optical packaging platform into production. (17 Jul 2026)

Source: 南茂 押價內外5%

ASE's founding brothers become Taiwan's richest

ASE Technology (3711 TT) chairman Jason Chang and vice chairman Richard Chang topped Forbes' 2026 Taiwan rich list for the first time, with combined wealth of US$22.4bn, on the advanced packaging demand that has lifted the group's market value. (17 Jul 2026)

Source: 為了撐過草創期賣掉不動產？從營建到科技業 日月光張虔生兄弟登上台灣首富