Apple and automakers will reportedly get priority at TSMC amid global chip shortage

A report from DigiTimes claims that Taiwanese chip maker TSMC will prioritise its production to meet demand from Apple and automakers in the third quarter of this year, followed by orders for PCs, servers, and networking devices.

This is hardly surprising given that Apple is easily TSMC's largest customer. Analysts believe Apple accounts for around 25 per cent of TSMC's total revenue last year.

That's well ahead of other large customers like NVIDIA and AMD which are believed to have contributed around six per cent to nine per cent each to TSMC's total revenue in 2020.

TSMC is the sole supplier of Apple's A-series and M-series chips that go into iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

ALSO READ: Apple unlikely to raise pricing of iPhone 13 despite global chip shortage

However, a device is more than just Apple-designed chips and CEO Tim Cook said during Apple's last earnings call that they are constrained by the supply of chips of "legacy nodes", which could ultimately still constrain the supply of products.

In fact, some believe that the ongoing chip shortage was the reason why Apple didn't unveil its rumoured new MacBook Pros at WWDC 2021 .

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.