Nvidia set to supplant Apple as TSMC’s largest customer

When Jensen Huang first met Morris Chang decades ago, he told the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. that one day Nvidia would be the chip foundry’s biggest customer.

That’s a story Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, was asked about on a recent podcast, and it’s a promise that is on track to be realized this year.

Nvidia will become TSMC’s largest customer this year, according to analyst estimates and Huang himself. Apple is believed to currently be TSMC’s largest customer, mostly to manufacture A-series chips for iPhones and M-series chips for PCs and servers.

The positional swap will mark a fundamental shift in the semiconductor industry, reflecting Nvidia’s growing importance amid the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out.

On the podcast published this month, Huang said that switch has already happened.

“Morris will be happy to know Nvidia is TSMC’s largest customer now,” said Huang, adding he was personally very happy about the milestone.

Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, said he projects Nvidia to generate $33 billion in TSMC revenue this year, or about 22% of the chip foundry’s total. Apple, by comparison, is projected to generate about $27 billion, or about 18% of TSMC’s revenue.

“The scale of this drastically changed,” Bajarin said. “A couple years ago, you could just see how much more capacity Nvidia was demanding from TSMC.”

Nvidia and TSMC declined to comment. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Apple is scheduled to report fiscal first-quarter earnings on Thursday, and the company is forecasting as much as 12% revenue growth in the quarter.

TSMC doesn’t discuss the ranking of its 522 customers, although it said in March that its top 10 customers made up 76% of the company’s net revenue, adding that its largest customer at the time accounted for 22% of its net revenue. The second-largest customer accounted for 12% of net revenue.

Nvidia’s impact is apparent in the chip foundry’s financials.

TSMC’s HPC sales, which include Nvidia’s AI chips, made up 55% of net revenue in fourth-quarter earnings that were reported earlier this month. That was up from 40% in 2022, the year the AI boom kicked off with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AI accelerators, which are currently dominated by Nvidia, made up “high-teens” of TSMC’s total 2025 sales.

Nvidia’s sales are rising quickly and outpacing Apple’s growth. In February, Nvidia is expected to report 66% growth to $213 billion in sales in its fiscal 2026, which ends this month. Apple’s growth in its fiscal 2025, ended in September, was 6.4%.

Additionally, Nvidia’s AI chips are bigger and more complicated to produce than what Apple manufactures, which means they cost more.

The shift also highlights TSMC’s role as the largest contract supply foundry in the world, providing chip manufacturing and…