TSMC Foundry Share Hits Record 72.5%, Squeezing Bitcoin (BTC) Mining Chip Supply

TSMC Hits Record 72.5% Foundry Share

The world's top ten wafer foundries posted combined revenue of $53.49 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 11.5% from the prior quarter and a fresh record for the industry, according to the September 9 release from research firm TrendForce. TSMC anchored the quarter: revenue reached roughly $40.2 billion, a 12.1% quarter-over-quarter increase, lifting its global foundry share to 72.5% — the highest ever recorded in the survey. Demand for AI server GPUs and XPUs kept TSMC's 5-nanometer, 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer lines effectively full, while early stocking for the new iPhone added volume. Notably, the company's 2-nanometer process contributed revenue for the first time, and both wafer shipments and average selling prices rose sequentially. Foundries, by definition, manufacture chips designed by fabless firms, and at advanced nodes the contest turns on capacity, yield and supply alignment with customer launch schedules. That mechanism matters here: with AI and high-performance computing absorbing leading-edge supply, every other customer class — including crypto miners, a group that since the ASIC era has priced hardware around coins like Dash (DASH) rather than GPUs — competes for whatever capacity remains.

SMIC Closes on Samsung Foundry

China's SMIC delivered the fastest growth among the majors, lifting second-quarter revenue more than 20% quarter-over-quarter to just over $3.0 billion and raising its market share to 5.4%. That cut its gap to second-placed Samsung Foundry to a mere 0.5 percentage points. Samsung's foundry revenue rose only 1.8% to $3.26 billion; even with new advanced-node orders — including HBM base dies — ramping and foundry quotes raised at 5/4nm and beyond, its share slipped to 5.9% as rivals grew faster. SMIC's momentum rested on early restocking across PC and notebook supply chains, steady orders for AI peripheral ICs and server networking products, plus a broad memory shortage that pushed up demand and pricing for NAND and NOR flash foundry work — the storage silicon behind suppliers such as SanDisk (SNDK). Mature-node demand recovered in parallel: fourth-ranked UMC grew 12.7% to about $2.18 billion on firmer 8-inch utilization, GlobalFoundries took fifth at roughly $1.79 billion, Hua Hong Group exceeded $1.27 billion in sixth, and Tower Semiconductor logged $460 million in seventh place.

CXMT Tops Memory Margins at 82%

Memory tells the complementary side of the AI trade. Nikkei-compiled EBIT data shows China's largest DRAM maker, CXMT (ChangXin Memory), posted an 82% operating margin in the second quarter — ahead of Micron at 80%, SK Hynix at 76% and Samsung's semiconductor division at 70%. A year earlier CXMT was loss-making to the tune of 29 billion yen; this quarter it booked roughly 1.9 trillion yen in operating profit, about $12.3 billion, on revenue that expanded tenfold year-over-year to 2.3 trillion yen. The driver is structural: Samsung and SK Hynix redirected resources toward high-value HBM, shrinking conventional DRAM supply and sending DDR5 prices sharply higher. Because HBM ships on annual contracts while CXMT's DDR5 tracks spot quotes, its margins reprice faster — and DDR5 profitability has exceeded HBM's since the first quarter, per TrendForce. Freed-up cash is buying capacity: first-half free cash flow turned positive at about 2.2 trillion yen, funding Hefei expansion and a new Shanghai fab, while Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent prioritize domestic chips. Since its July listing, CXMT's market value of roughly 87 trillion yen has passed Tencent's, even though its global DRAM share sits near 7% against Samsung's 39%, SK Hynix's 26% and Micron's 25% — and its HBM3 yield remains only around 25%. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Q3 Wafer Starts in Focus

The through-line across foundries and memory is a single force: AI compute is repricing the entire silicon supply chain, squeezing leading-edge capacity and legacy DRAM at once. That matters for digital assets because Bitcoin (BTC) mining hardware competes for the same advanced-node allocation, and whale-scale holders rotating between AI narratives and crypto inherit the input costs this data describes. TrendForce's official release projects third-quarter momentum: consumer IC customers keeping wafer starts steady on mature-node tightness and expected price increases, plus flagship phone seasonality and new AI/HPC platform ramps. Our desk's reading: watch allocation, not just revenue — capacity crowding is the real signal for mining hardware costs into 2027.