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TSMC's one-quarter revenue gain outran Samsung's entire foundry quarter
Counterpoint puts TSMC at 73% of second-quarter foundry revenue and Samsung Foundry at 5.9%. Because that share is weighted by leading-edge prices, it measures the scarcity of advanced capacity as much as the volume of it.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Counterpoint Research put TSMC at about 73% of worldwide foundry revenue in the second quarter of 2026, the second consecutive quarter the company has held that share.
- For calendar 2025 TSMC booked $122.54bn in foundry revenue, a 36.1% year-over-year rise that gave it a 69.9% full-year share.
- Samsung Foundry has held between 5.9% and 7.2% across recent periods, with SMIC near 5.4% and UMC and GlobalFoundries each below 6%.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A roadmap that needs 7nm-or-below silicon is scheduling against one supplier's queue: a competitor billing roughly $3.3bn a quarter cannot take on demand reassigned from a $40.2bn one.
- cost Fabless buyers have no second leading-edge vendor at scale to quote against, and cryptobriefing.com argues that rising leading-edge prices convert into TSMC margin while the fabs run full.
- contradiction TrendForce assigns part of the 12.1% quarterly gain to smartphone inventory builds, so reading the share number as a clean measure of AI demand overstates what it shows.
- exposure Bitmain's ASIC miners and mining GPUs come out of the same TSMC capacity as AI accelerators, so a tightening there lands directly on mining operators' hardware costs.
The 73% is a share of dollars. Advanced nodes, meaning 7nm and below, produced 74% of TSMC's wafer revenue in 2025 [6]. TrendForce credits both higher wafer shipments and rising average selling prices on leading-edge nodes for the revenue growth [9], so the same market counted in wafers would put TSMC lower than 73%. Both research firms published revenue shares [1][3].
The TrendForce figures give the size of the whole market. Revenue approaching $40.2bn at a 72.5% share implies roughly $55.4bn of foundry revenue in the June quarter [1], of which Samsung's 5.9% is about $3.3bn [2]. TSMC's 12.1% sequential gain came off an implied $35.9bn in the prior quarter, so it added around $4.3bn of revenue in three months [3]. One quarter's increase at the leader was about a billion dollars bigger than the whole quarter at the runner-up [4].
Full utilization alongside rising prices is what demand ahead of supply looks like, and TrendForce reports both [4][9]. It also credits smartphone inventory builds for part of the 12.1% [4]. And there are two separate queues: the source calls CoWoS packaging essential for the multi-chip modules AI accelerators require [10], and a customer holding wafer starts still needs a packaging slot.
Samsung has sat between 5.9% and 7.2% across recent periods, with SMIC near 5.4% and UMC and GlobalFoundries each under 6% [7]. A flat band fits a fab short of capacity and a fab short of customers equally well, and the published shares do not separate the two. Two other readings survive the numbers. TSMC's share has gone from 69.9% for calendar 2025 to 72.5-73% in the June quarter [6], a gain of under three and a half points that leading-edge pricing alone could account for. And 2nm revenue is already appearing in the mix [8].
Utilization and pricing would settle it. If TSMC keeps growing revenue while utilization eases or leading-edge ASPs flatten, volume is the source of the growth and allocation is not the binding term in anyone's roadmap. In my view the concentration figure is solid and the allocation story is still an inference. The 73% is measured in dollars, so it implies allocation pressure only while utilization stays full. At the June quarter's pace TSMC would book about $160.8bn for the year, 31% above 2025's $122.54bn [7].
What to watch
- Whether TrendForce's next count still shows full utilization of advanced capacity once the smartphone inventory build ends.
- Samsung Foundry's next quarterly share: a move back above the 7.2% top of its recent band would mean leading-edge demand is being reassigned.
- How fast 2nm revenue grows in TSMC's mix relative to leading-edge average selling prices.