Uh-oh, TSMC price hike means Apple Silicon is also getting more expensive
As well as rapid growth in memory prices, Apple may have a second reason to raise the cost of its products – TSMC plans 10% price increases of its own.
Culpium tells us TSMC has warned customers to prepare for price increases across its most advanced chips, and the price hike will hit a lot of big names, including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek.
Up to 10% more expensive
The price increases vary depending on the product, but overall, an increase of 5-10% is being put in place, the report said. The report also said price increases have already started rolling out.
Please subscribe to The Core Apple news summaries here and support our work.
TSMC has issued no comment, but we did hear it intended to increase its prices at the beginning of the year – and, like RAM prices, AI investments are to blame.
In this case, the VC-funded demand for processors and GPU chips to drive the vast server farm deployment that is taking place. Their demand means supply is more limited than before, which drives up the cost.
Apple feels the pressure
“Apple, which once held a dominant position on TSMC’s customer list, now needs to fight for production capacity. With the continuing AI boom, and each GPU from clients like Nvidia and AMD taking up a larger footprint per wafer, the iPhone maker’s chip designs are no longer guaranteed a place among TSMC’s almost two dozen fab,” Culpium said at that time.
Apple may be putting together a plan to supplement processor manufacturing form TSMC with product purchased from Intel, but that will take time to put in place, leaving Apple, and Apple customers, liable to product price increases for a while.
All the same, with processor price hikes, painful memory price increases, continued international political instability, and the unfolding side impacts of oil supply disruption on low end components such as plastic for wire cabling, it’s of little surprise that Apple and the wider tech industry are warning of price increases at this time.
Please join me on social media at BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, even better, please subscribe to The Core for your daily fix of human-curated Apple News.
