When CC Wei visited Cupertino last August, he had bad news for his largest client. Apple would need to acquiesce to the largest price rise in years, TSMC’s CEO told its executives.
Tim Cook and his team took the news on the chin. Wei had been telegraphing hikes in earnings calls over the past few quarters, and the Taiwanese chip maker’s rising gross margins were testament to its increasing pricing power.
That wasn’t the worst news, my sources tell me.
Apple, which once held a dominant position on TSMC’s customer list, now needs to fight for production capacity. With the continuing AI boom, and each GPU from clients like Nvidia and AMD taking up a larger footprint per wafer, the iPhone maker’s chip designs are no longer guaranteed a place among TSMC’s almost two dozen fabs.
What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client.
According to Culpium analysis and discussions with sources in the supply chain, Nvidia likely took top spot in at least one or two quarters of last year. “We don’t discuss that,” Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang told Culpium Thursday when asked about the change in client rankings.
Final data will be unveiled in a few months when TSMC releases its annual report — which includes revenue from its top clients — but there’s every chance that Apple’s lead for the full year narrowed significantly and may have even fallen below Nvidia’s. If it didn’t happen in 2025, then it’s almost certain to do so in 2026, my sources tell me.
Public data helps tells the story.
TSMC’s revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, it reported Thursday. Nvidia’s sales for the fiscal year through January 2026 is set to climb 62% while Apple’s product revenue — which excludes services — is on track to grow just 3.6% for the 12-months to December 2025, according to Culpium estimates based on earnings reports and company guidance.
Apple’s role as the primary driver of TSMC revenue growth ended five years ago. In 2018 TSMC sales would have even fallen if not for incremental purchases by Apple that year. Now, the Cupertino company is posting low single-digit revenue growth while Nvidia is skyrocketing.
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