For the first quarter ending 31 March, the world's top contract chipmaker posted NT$839.25 billion ($25.8 billion) in revenue, up 41.6 per cent from a year earlier. Analysts had expected a more modest climb .

High-performance computing—think data centre GPUs—accounted for 59 per cent of TSMC’s sales, cushioning a nasty 22 per cent plunge in smartphone chip sales and a nine per cent drop in connected device demand

TSMC Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang said: “Our business in the first quarter was impacted by smartphone seasonality, partially offset by continued growth in AI-related demand.” 

That AI-powered revenue spike lifted the company’s bottom line to NT$361.56 billion ($11.12 billion), with adjusted earnings of $2.12 per US share—beating the $2.07 FactSet consensus. Not bad in a supposedly soft quarter .

Advanced process chips (7nm and below) made up 73 per cent of wafer volume, with the flagship 3nm line holding steady at 22 per cent of revenue. Huang expects 3nm and 5nm output to push even harder into the second quarter.

TSMC's eyes are fixed on the looming two-nanometer node, set for mass production later this year. The node’s gate-all-around transistor design promises a 24 to 35 per cent power efficiency jump without sacrificing performance. AMD’s already signed on to use it for its new Venice line of server CPUs, due to start shipping next year .

In the lab, TSMC is also quietly preparing to disrupt chipmaking geometry itself. Nikkei Asia says the chip titan plans to test square wafers—larger than today’s circular standard—by 2027 .

But speculation of a takeover or team-up with Troubled Chipzilla's fab division has been swatted away. TSMC Chief Executive C.C. Wei told investors there’s no such joint venture in the pipeline .