By Wen-Yee Lee and Ben Blanchard
TAIPEI, Oct 15 (Reuters) - TSMC, the world's largest manufacturer of advanced AI chips, said on Thursday it expects fourth-quarter revenue to rise by as much as 61% from a year earlier, after posting a sixth consecutive quarter of record earnings as it rides an AI boom.
The robust results should help ease concerns that the AI investment surge is losing momentum; they come a day after ASML, the world's largest maker of tools used to make AI chips and advanced semiconductors,
provided an upbeat outlook.
TSMC's Taipei-listed shares closed down 2% ahead of the earnings release, in line with a broader tech sell-off amid worries that more interest rate hikes from the US Federal Reserve could pummel shares of AI stocks that are sensitive to higher borrowing costs.
Shares of South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix slid more than 10%.
Analysts say demand for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's (TSMC) AI chipmaking capacity, as well as its advanced chip packaging technology, CoWoS, remains strong.
That has catapulted Asia's most valuable company, a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple, to new heights. Its market capitalisation is almost double that of Samsung Electronics at around $2 trillion.
TSMC said net profit in the July-to-September quarter hit T$763.1 billion ($23.59 billion), up 69% from a year earlier and beating a T$746.3 billion LSEG SmartEstimate compiled from 16 analysts.
On an earnings call following the results, TSMC said it expects fourth-quarter revenue of $52.3 billion to $54.3 billion, up from $33.73 billion a year earlier.
It maintained its capital spending expectation for 2026 at $60 billion to $64 billion.
The result was TSMC's highest-ever quarterly net income, as well as its 11th consecutive quarter of profit growth.
Last week, it reported a 50% year-on-year rise in third-quarter revenue, beating market forecasts and hitting a new record.
TSMC is investing $265 billion to build chip factories in the US state of Arizona, including an additional $100 billion that was unveiled in July.
In September, Reuters reported that TSMC was evaluating a potential investment in Texas. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also said last week that his companies would build and operate the Terafab AI chip complex, with TSMC potentially subleasing a part of it.
On its July earnings call, the company raised its capex forecast for this year to between $60 billion and $64 billion from a previous prediction at the high end of $52 billion to $56 billion.
ASML said on Wednesday customers were already looking to place orders for 2029 and 2030, easing concerns that the AI investment boom was losing momentum.
TSMC's Taipei-listed shares have gained 57% so far this year, in line with a 62% rise for the broader Taiwanese market.
($1 = 32.3450 Taiwan dollars)
(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
