TSMC Puts Up to $1 Billion Into Anthropic and OpenAI

TSMC's board has approved equity investments of up to $500 million each in Anthropic and OpenAI, a shift that takes the world's largest contract chipmaker beyond its traditional take-orders-from-fabless model and into direct capital partnerships with the AI labs themselves. Taiwanese outlets including the United Daily News and the China Times reported the decision on the 11th, a day after the board signed off.

The structure matters for anyone watching capacity allocation. TSMC will buy Anthropic common shares within the $500 million ceiling, with the per-share price pegged to Anthropic's IPO price. The OpenAI stake comes through preferred shares, also capped at $500 million. Separately, the board approved an investment arm with its own $500 million ceiling for strategic deals across the semiconductor industry and its ecosystem — roughly 669.3 billion won per commitment at the top end.

What does the capex approval change?

Alongside the stakes, the board greenlit capital expenditure of about $40.93 billion (54.7 trillion won) to support long-term capacity plans. The money is earmarked for 2027 and covers advanced processes, advanced packaging, expanded specialty processes, plant construction and R&D. For TSMC's equipment and materials suppliers, that's a multi-year demand signal worth about the annual GDP of a mid-sized European economy.

The company also framed the equity moves as a way to deepen what it calls core computing alliances. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing their own application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) projects geared toward AI model inference, so TSMC now holds a financial seat at the table with two of its most promising future customers.

Why is TSMC hedging on Nvidia?

The subtext, as Taiwanese media read it, is concentration risk. Nvidia currently accounts for a very high share of TSMC's revenue, and that dependence could create problems down the road. By taking equity positions, TSMC secures considerable bargaining power and strategic flexibility in future capacity allocation and pricing, the outlets projected. It also signals, in their reading, that management takes an optimistic view of AI's development generally.

How big is Anthropic's raise?

Anthropic said in a filing on the 10th local time that it plans to sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 apiece, raising as much as $64.4 billion (86.27 trillion won) at the top of the band. That's one of the largest IPO-sized raises on record. On top of it, a private placement will bring in an additional $26 billion from Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC itself — meaning the chipmaker joins its own customers and rivals as a direct shareholder.

What did October revenue do?

TSMC's consolidated October revenue climbed 59.7% year-over-year and 14.7% month-over-month to NT$586.89 billion (about 23.8 trillion won), a new monthly record, the company said on the 10th, according to Taiwan's Central News Agency. It beat the previous high of NT$514.81 billion set in August by roughly 14%.

Demand for cutting-edge 2-nanometer process chips is seen as the main driver. Revenue for January through October reached NT$4.49 trillion (about 182 trillion won), up 43.3% from a year earlier — a pace that works out to more than NT$448 billion in revenue every month on average.

Looking ahead, TSMC has guided fourth-quarter revenue of $52.3 billion to $54.3 billion (about 69.9 trillion to 72.6 trillion won). The midpoint implies a 58% rise from a year earlier and a 14% gain from the previous quarter. Based on that guidance, analysts expect November and December monthly revenue between NT$538.1 billion and NT$569.9 billion (about 21.8 trillion to 23.1 trillion won).

Put together, the picture is straightforward: record monthly revenue, a $40.9 billion capacity commitment for 2027, and up to $1 billion of equity tying TSMC directly to the AI labs designing their own inference silicon. The fabless-foundry wall just got thinner.