TSMC says war not expected to impact material supply in ‘near term’

BusinessInternationalTSMC says war not expected to impact material supply in 'near term'By AFP -Apr 16, 2026TAIPEI, Taiwan: Taiwan’s TSMC said Thursday it does not expect the Middle East war to impact its supply of chipmaking materials such as helium and hyrogen in the near term. “We source from multiple suppliers in different regions, and we have prepared safety stock inventory on hand,” chief financial officer Wendell Huang told an earnings call. “We do not expect any near-term impact on our operations.” AI demand drives TSMC’s net profit to fresh record Taiwanese chip manufacturer said that net profit for January-March leaped to a fresh quarterly record, boosted by the race to develop artificial intelligence technology. Massive global demand for AI hardware means business is booming for TSMC, the world’s biggest contract maker of microchips used in everything from Apple phones to Nvidia’s AI processors. TSMC said its net profit for the first quarter of 2026 rose a whopping 58.3 percent from a year ago to NT$572.5 billion ($18 billion). The figure trounced estimates of NT$540.20 billion in a Bloomberg survey of analysts. Governments and tech giants are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building new data centres that can run and train AI tools such as chatbots, image generators and agents that can execute tasks. Last month, Jensen Huang, head of top US chip designer Nvidia, said the entire tech world feels they could develop their AI and grow revenue “if they could just get more capacity”. Ahead of the earnings announcement, Ian Lyall at Proactive Investors said it appeared TSMC is “so deeply embedded in the AI supply chain that macro headwinds are struggling to leave a mark”. “Advanced-node chip production, the bleeding-edge manufacturing that only TSMC can reliably deliver at scale, is running at capacity,” he noted. TSMC is “supplying chips for artificial intelligence accelerators, next-generation smartphones, and the data centre build-out t...