TSMC's 2nm is booked through 2028. Whose roadmaps are paying for it.

Five fabs entering volume production this year. Two in Hsinchu (Fab 20, P1 and P2) and three in Kaohsiung (Fab 22, P1 through P3). 70% CAGR on 2nm wafer-out through 2028. C.C. Wei confirmed capex at the upper end of $52-56 billion on the April call, speaker turn 14. The 2nm allocation is the supply chain story of the year, and it has already been decided.

Apple takes the first wafers. That is not new. What is new is the back-half allocation, which TSMC has been signing through Q1 with a list of customers that includes Nvidia's consumer Blackwell-Ultra refresh, AMD's MI400, Google's seventh-generation TPU, and one fabless startup whose product I cannot name on the record. Qualcomm is on the second-half waiting list.

What the constraint is, exactly

The bottleneck is not lithography. ASML 2150i tools are coming off the production line at 12 per quarter and TSMC has receivership on most of them. The bottleneck is CoWoS-L packaging, which has been the actual capacity ceiling on AI accelerators for six quarters running. CoWoS-L 2026 capacity: 90,000 wafers/quarter, vs. demand modeled at 130,000 by EOY. The gap is whose chip ships and whose slips.

Yield on the N2 process node is reportedly tracking ahead of N3E at the equivalent ramp point — by about three months, per two engineers familiar with the data. That is genuinely good. The yield curve will bend toward the customer who locked allocation first, which for the bulk of 2027 means Apple and Nvidia.

What to watch for

• The August earnings call. Wei will be asked about late-2027 allocation and will dodge it with a number.
• Samsung's GAA 2nm yield. Samsung Foundry has been running its own 2nm pilot since Q4. If the yield curve crosses into mass-production territory, TSMC has competitive pressure for the first time in three years.
• Intel 18A. Intel's current 18A ramp is on the back-end of the schedule. Whether 18A picks up Apple or Nvidia overflow in 2027 is a real question, not a courtesy one.

Next milestone: TSMC technology symposium, August 12, Hsinchu. The capex update will be quiet; the allocation announcements will not.