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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

At what point does this become a monopoly issue?

Sure others could have outbid hypothetically so it is on paper fair but Apple has a lot of cash.

The thing is, that Apple cash isn't just buying the production of TSMC, it's funding TSMC's R&D of the next node that they're buying. Without Apple, it's very likely that we would not be continuing to improve nodes at this rate.

2 issues in fact, one is TSMC being the only one capable of making these amazing chips and the second is Apple buying their entire supply. Now if any of that counts as a monopoly I don't think so

And the entire yield coming from a region of the world that China has said it will annex (at some point).

Why aren't there other companies outbidding Apple?

Presumably they're trying and that's driving up the price for Apple?

Because Apple has more money and higher margins than they do.

Apple is the only company to sell an insanely highly mass produced product at insanely high prices. Usually you have to pick one or the other.

So the reason is that no-one can afford to out bid them.

They can't. Apple is the most valuable company in the world and has more cash on hand than many medium sized countries.

What do you mean "on hand", isn't their net worth mostly the company's stocks which they would have to sell for it to be "on hand"?

> isn't their net worth mostly the company's stocks

I think that would better be described as "market cap", which is certainly a much bigger number than "cash on hand." The latter is basically liquid assets, which I think is a much more important metric when we're talking about outbidding competitors for fab space (among other things).

> "Cash on hand can be defined as cash deposits at financial institutions that can immediately be withdrawn at any time, and investments maturing in one year or less that are highly liquid and therefore regarded as cash equivalents and reported with or near cash line items"

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cash-on...

Because they don't have the money.

Apple's net income has been at least $20bn every quarter for the past two years[1]. Both Intel and AMD make a small fraction of that[2][3].

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/net-inc...

[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/net-income

Not so much that they don't have the money (they don't, I agree), but the bigger issue is even if they could their margins aren't nearly as good as Apples are.

Their potential margins. So they would be taking large risk to potentially make much less.

To give a slightly different answer, because they don't need to.

Intel has their own foundry, AMD is quite happy with whats a fairly recent move to 5 nm. Graphics card manufacturers are more concerned with selling off old cards than making new ones.

Apple isn't going to get very good yields out of 3nm and will likely only get to put it in a few products for now, but for a few months they get to say they'll be the biggest baddest company on the block, which is what apple marketing is all about.

Qualcomm gets the entire mobile market either way, and for desktop/server manufacturers apple isn't an option. Apple 3nm doesn't directly compete with amd/intel, so why worry

Because it's a bad deal. N3 isn't a good node and offers ZERO SRAM scaling. It's a stopgap for N2 GAA.

At the same time, chip shipments have dropped like a rock as everyone braces for recession. Nvidia allegedly even tried to cancel most of their N5 orders because they didn't think they could move the chips.

Apple is pretty much the only company willing to pay large amounts into a risky market. There may not have even been any serious bids aside from their own.

Conjecture: I suspect that Apple is underwriting or paying for the new fabs years in advance, since Apple has wads of cash overseas that it needs to invest (due to US tax laws). Apple can place orders years in advance for all the output of entire fabs, and by paying for fabs it would be able to control costs of exclusive orders for the production. Apple doesn’t want to bid prices up against competitors, so long term contracts make sense. TSMC would perhaps not be able to finance such aggressive moves to new nodes without Apple, and contracts can remove most financial risk for TSMC.

The above is just capitalism at work - the richest company in the world investing in the world’s most expensive toys. Apple has ~5x the market cap of NVidia and Apple can predict their usage of silicon, whereas NVidia’s market is more volatile.

Whether the above is monopoly power is arguable.

I also would strongly suspect that TSMC has political requirements embedded in the contracts. For example Taiwan needs phones that are secure against China (security against state level attacks), and Apple can meet needs that other fab users cannot. There is no doubt in my mind that TSMC are using Apple as part of their silicon shield: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Taiwan+Silicon-Shield

This is phenomena is called monopsony and Apple has been doing this since forever (HDs, "retina" displays, glass, semis, etc). In Apple's case, they have essentially subsidize innovation and manufacturing capacity at the expense of temporary exclusivity and I believe that it's been beneficial for the market at large. It's like how guaranteed purchase contracts were instrumental in bringing COVID vaccine development forward.

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