alt Hacker NewsI think most customers nowadays pre-pay for fab capacity. TSMC is running at 100% capacity for their N5, N3, and N2 nodes. Apple certainly makes extra commitments to be the first to use a new TSMC advanced node. They will be the first to ship an N2 chip by a few months when they release the iPhone 18 Pro.
However, I'm talking about booking wafers from a fab that hasn't started and won't make a single wafer 3 years from now. The scale is different. Imagine Nvidia, Apple, Google, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon telling Wall Street in their earnings report that they sent TSMC $5 billion each this quarter and won't receive a single wafer for another 3 years from the investment. I fully expect this to happen soon. I'm almost certain that you'll hear in the upcoming earnings reports that big tech sent Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix billions in advance payment to secure memory supply years from now. I think this is likely the same for chip fab capacity soon.
> I'm almost certain that you'll hear in the upcoming earnings reports that big tech sent ..billions in advance payment to secure memory supply years from now.
And this would be no different than investing billions in R&D (Ex. Meta and AR) for future payouts.
Or, Apple buying 10000 advance CNC machines for their manufacturer. In this case timeline for future payout is perhaps much shorter but the pertinent point will be Apple invested in Capex upfront.