TSMC hints at possible price rises amid rising costs

The BBC asked TSMC's chief financial officer Wendell Huang whether the company was likely to raise prices for customers. He replied, "We don't increase the price suddenly, four fold, five fold." When pressed again on the matter, he said, "We reflect our value." Huang explained that that value includes geographic diversification — having fabs at multiple locations — technology leadership, meaning the best chip production nodes, and manufacturing access, which is the ability to crank out large volumes.

He also noted that inflation had driven TSMC's costs up, though he did not specify by how much, and reiterated, "We want to reflect our value." The exchange leaves room for potential increases. Memory chips have seen sudden four- to five-fold price jumps, and because CPUs and GPUs already represent a much larger share of a PC's cost — memory was at most about 10% of a high-end gaming rig while CPU and GPU combined might be 60% or 70% — similar rises for those components would have a bigger impact on overall PC prices.

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