TSMC Wafer Shipments and Revenue Per Wafer

Microchip. Pixabay Image.

This page presents TSMC’s wafer shipments and revenue per wafer shipped.

Let’s dive in!

Investors interested in other key statistics of TSMC may find more resources in the following pages:

Revenue

• TSMC revenue by product category: wafer sales and others,
• TSMC revenue by process node: 3nm, 5nm, 7nm, 10nm and more,
• TSMC revenue by market: HPC, Smartphone, IoT, Automotive, etc.,
• TSMC revenue by region: North America, Asia Pacific, EMEA, China, and Japan,
• TSMC revenue by country: U.S., China, Taiwan, Japan, etc.,

R&D Comparison

• TSMC vs Intel,
• TSMC vs Samsung,

Profit Margin Comparison

• TSMC vs Intel,
• TSMC vs Samsung,

Other Statistics

• TSMC capital expenditures vs operating cash flow,

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Definitions

To help readers understand the content better, the following terms and glossaries have been provided.

What is a wafer: A wafer is a thin, circular slice of high-purity crystalline semiconductor material — typically silicon — that serves as the foundation (substrate) for fabricating integrated circuits (ICs) and microchips.

It acts as the “dough” for the chip, where hundreds or thousands of identical circuits are printed, etched, and layered on top to form microprocessors, memory, and sensors

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Insight & Summary of TSMC’s Wafer Shipments and Revenue Per Wafer

The following analysis consolidates the trends observed across TSMC’s wafer shipments and revenue per wafer for the 2015–2025 period.

• TSMC’s wafer economics tell a story of two simultaneous forces: volume growth and dramatic pricing power. Wafer shipments grew from 8,763 thousand units in 2015 to 15,022 thousand units in 2025 — a 71.4% volume increase over ten years, or approximately 5–6% annually. Over the same period, revenue per wafer (where data is available, 2018–2025) more than doubled from NT$84,756 ($2,712) in 2018 to NT$217,851 ($6,971) in 2025 — a 157% increase. The combination of volume growth and pricing power has produced wafer revenue growth that vastly outpaces either metric in isolation: total wafer revenue grew from NT$911B ($29.2B) in 2018 to NT$3,273B ($104.7B) in 2025 — a 259% increase in US dollar terms over seven years.

• Revenue per wafer is TSMC’s most strategically important metric — and it has been accelerating. Revenue per wafer grew from NT$84,756 ($2,712) in 2018 to NT$217,851 ($6,971) in 2025, with a 3-year average of NT$189,823 ($6,074). This continuous increase — unbroken across every year in the dataset — reflects TSMC’s systematic migration of its customer mix toward higher-value advanced nodes. As each generation of leading-edge process (N7 → N5 → N3 → N2) carries a higher price per wafer than the previous, and as the mix of advanced node wafers within total shipments increases, the blended revenue per wafer rises structurally. The jump from NT$130,588 ($4,179) in 2022 to NT$156,850 ($5,019) in 2023 — a 20.1% increase despite a volume decline year — is the clearest demonstration that pricing outpaced volume in TSMC’s business model even during a semiconductor down cycle.

• Wafer shipments are more cyclical and volume-sensitive than revenue per wafer. Shipments peaked at 15,253 thousand units in 2022, fell to 12,002 thousand in 2023 (-21.3% — the sharpest contraction in the dataset), partially recovered to 12,910 thousand in 2024, and returned toward peak at 15,022 thousand in 2025. The FY2023 volume decline occurred despite TSMC maintaining revenue per wafer growth of +20.1% that year, confirming that the pricing power mechanism partially insulated revenue even during inventory-driven volume weakness. This dynamic — volume down, price per wafer up — is unique to TSMC’s position as the sole leading-edge foundry: customers cannot substitute TSMC with another supplier for N5/N3 production, giving TSMC pricing leverage through the cycle.

• The FY2022 period was a dual inflection: both shipment volume and pricing peaked simultaneously — a rare combination. Y2022 produced record shipments (15,253 thousand) and record revenue per wafer at the time (NT$130,588 / $4,179), generating total wafer revenue of NT$1,992B ($63.7B). The subsequent FY2023 correction illustrates the structural separation between the two drivers: volume fell sharply while pricing continued to rise. The FY2025 recovery to near-2022 volumes (15,022 thousand) but at a much higher revenue per wafer ($6,971 vs. $4,179 in 2022) produced the highest-ever wafer revenue of NT$3,273B ($104.7B) — 64% above the 2022 wafer revenue peak despite similar volumes. This is a powerful demonstration of the compounding effect of node migration pricing over a three-year cycle.

• The 3-year average wafer shipments of 13,311 thousand units understates the current run-rate. FY2025’s 15,022 thousand units represents a recovery to near-peak volumes, while the 3-year average includes the 2023 trough (12,002 thousand). The relevant forward-looking metric is the FY2025 run-rate of $104.7B in wafer revenue at $6,971 per wafer — which implies that TSMC’s foundry business alone is now a $100B+ annual revenue enterprise at current pricing, before any non-wafer revenue contributions.

• Structural Takeaway: TSMC’s wafer economics have moved decisively toward a high-pricing, medium-volume model rather than a high-volume, commodity-pricing model. Revenue per wafer has grown at approximately 14–15% annually since 2018, far outpacing the 5–6% annual shipment volume growth. This pricing power trajectory — driven by leading-edge node migration — is the core engine of TSMC’s revenue growth and margin expansion. The critical question for the next five years is whether the introduction of N2 and A16 nodes can sustain the revenue-per-wafer growth trajectory as TSMC simultaneously expands volumes for AI chip customers.

The table below combines all TSMC’s wafer shipments and revenue per wafer metrics into a single view for the latest three fiscal years.

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Wafer Revenue and Wafer Shipments

You may find the definition of wafer here: what is a wafer.

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Revenue Per Wafer (NT$) and (US$)

You may find the definition of wafer here: what is a wafer.

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References and Credits

1. All financial figures presented were obtained and referenced from TSMC’s annual reports published on the company’s investor relations page: TSMC Annual Reports.

2. Pixabay Images.

Disclosure

We may use the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to produce some of the text in this article. However, the data is directly obtained from original sources (usually the annual and quarterly reports) and meticulously cross-checked by our editors multiple times to ensure its accuracy and reliability.

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