Catenaa, Friday, May 15, 2026- TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said on Friday it plans to sell up to 152 million shares in Vanguard International Semiconductor via a block trade to financial institutional investors.
TSMC said the proposed share sale would reduce its holding in Vanguard International Semiconductor, or VIS, to about 19% from around 27.1% on a fully diluted basis.
TSMC said it has no plans to sell additional VIS shares in the foreseeable future. At current prices, 152 million VIS shares are worth around $850 million.
TSMC said the sale would not affect its strategic relationship with VIS, including outsourcing interposer production and licensing gallium nitride (GaN) technology to the company. It added that the share sale is part of its plan to focus resources on core business activities.
In June 2024, TSMC ceased to have representation on VIS’s board of directors.
Meanwhile, TSMC said that it believes the global chip industry is heading toward a staggering $1.5 trillion market by 2030, underscoring just how massive the AI-driven semiconductor boom could become over the rest of the decade.
The forecast, which TSMC reiterated this week after previously discussing it during a US technology symposium, reflects the company’s growing confidence that artificial intelligence and high-performance computing will dominate the next era of semiconductor demand.
According to TSMC, AI and HPC alone are expected to make up roughly 55% of the projected $1.5 trillion market by 2030, far ahead of smartphones at 20% and automotive chips at 10%.
The company is already racing to keep up with that demand. TSMC said it plans to accelerate capacity expansion through 2025 and 2026, including nine additional phases of wafer fabs and advanced packaging facilities next year.
Demand for its most advanced technologies, including 2-nanometer and A16 chips, is expected to grow at a 70% annualized pace between 2026 and 2028.
One of the biggest bottlenecks remains advanced packaging, especially CoWoS technology used to connect Nvidia’s AI accelerators with high bandwidth memory systems.
TSMC said CoWoS capacity is expected to grow at more than an 80% compound annual rate between 2022 and 2027, while AI accelerator wafer demand itself is projected to jump 11-fold from 2022 through 2026.
The expansion is happening globally. TSMC continues to rapidly build out operations in Arizona, Japan, and Germany as countries and companies push to secure semiconductor supply chains closer to home.
In Arizona alone, the company expects output to increase 1.8 times year over year by 2026, with yields comparable to Taiwan.
