alt Hacker NewsTSMC's 2nm is much, much higher demand. Apple's probably getting priced-out of the node by Nvidia in much the same way Apple bought out TSMC 5nm before.
Apple's cheaper products and hardware cash cows can't afford to pay that sort of tax, so it makes sense to boot them onto 18A. Those are the binned products that would have been throttling anyways.
TSMC and Apple have a long standing partnership, and I doubt TSMC is dumb enough to throw a massive amount of long term business away in exchange for short term AI bubble gains.
TSMC has even been cutting Apple special terms they don't give others:
> every time TSMC introduces a major upgrade, called an advanced process node, to its chipmaking, the defect rates of the dies stay relatively high until it can iron out the kinks. For 3 nm, the most cutting-edge node launching this year, the yield on wafers has recently been in the range of 70% to 80%, according to analysts, as well as one person with direct knowledge of the process.
That number would be a tough pill to swallow for TSMC’s customers, which typically pay for the wafer and all of the dies on it—including the bad ones. But in a break from standard practice, the Taiwanese manufacturer has only been charging Apple for dies that work—“known good dies,” in industry parlance—these people said.
https://archive.ph/yfGLp