TSMC's August revenue rose 53.3% in NT dollars to a monthly record, and its deputy COO says it still cannot meet demand

by Ryo Tanaka · September 10, 2026

Technology Reporter, US Market Current

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported consolidated revenue of NT$514,806 million for August 2026, a 53.3% increase from the same month a year earlier, according to the monthly revenue table on the company's investor relations site. TSMC reports these monthly figures in New Taiwan dollars, and the 53.3% is a year-over-year change in that currency, not a month-over-month move and not a dollar-denominated one. Quartz and Charles Schwab both described it as a record monthly revenue high.

The sequential move is nearly as notable as the annual one. July revenue was NT$467,580 million, which puts August up about 10.1% month over month on those two figures. Converting to dollars, Quartz put the August figure at roughly $16.35 billion and Bloomberg at about $16.3 billion; Quartz described it as the fourth consecutive month of revenue growth and attributed the gain to artificial-intelligence chip orders.

Cumulatively, TSMC's investor relations page shows January through August 2026 revenue of NT$3,386,870 million, up 39.3% from the corresponding period of 2025. The page carries the note that "Year 2026 figures have not been audited."

The monthly cadence this year has been anything but smooth, which is worth keeping in view before treating any single month as a trend. On the company's own year-over-year numbers, June revenue was up 67.9%, July up 44.7%, and August up 53.3%. February, by contrast, was up 22.2%. Monthly semiconductor revenue moves with shipment timing and customer scheduling as much as with end demand.

What separates this cycle from a normal upswing is that the constraint appears to sit on the supply side rather than the order book. Bloomberg, in reporting the August number, quoted Deputy Co-Chief Operating Officer Cliff Hou saying this month: "Right now you're almost 4x or 5x, trying to catch up, but still you cannot meet demand." The same report said the company's chipmaking tool requirements have nearly doubled since the end of last year.

The response is a construction program without a recent precedent at the company. Bloomberg reported TSMC is building roughly 20 factories simultaneously, against a historical pace of four to five new buildings at a time, and has an agreement with ASML to deploy advanced High-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — priced at roughly $400 million each — in mass production starting from 2030. Capital expenditure is guided to $60 billion to $64 billion for 2026, per the same report.

On the revenue outlook, Bloomberg reported that TSMC forecasts full-year 2026 sales growth slightly above 40% in U.S. dollar terms — a different basis from the NT dollar monthly figures above — and that analysts anticipate about 46.8% sales growth for the current quarter. Those are the company's and analysts' figures, not projections of this publication.

For U.S. investors, TSMC's monthly disclosure functions as one of the few near-real-time reads on the AI buildout, because so much of the compute being installed in American data centers is fabricated there. Bloomberg named Nvidia Corp. and Apple Inc. among the customers driving demand. A foundry running at capacity is a statement about orders already placed, which is a different kind of evidence from a hyperscaler's spending plan.

The share reaction has been running well ahead of the broad market for most of the year. Bloomberg reported Thursday that TSMC shares have gained roughly 60% since the beginning of 2026.

That strength has not been evenly distributed across semiconductors. Schwab's market update, published as of 9:22 a.m. ET Thursday, said chip and AI-related stocks mostly fell in the morning, "possibly a sign of investor caution." TheStreet listed Intel down 5.7%, describing it as profit-taking after a multi-session rally, and Freeport-McMoRan down 7.3% as copper prices retreated from record highs. Schwab, meanwhile, had Apple up about 1% after introducing a folding iPhone priced above the current product, and Meta Platforms up another 1% following a 6% surge the prior session and a JPMorgan upgrade to overweight from neutral that cited the company's Muse AI agent announcement. AI-linked capital equipment and AI-linked end demand are not trading as one block.

The macro backdrop is not helping the multiple-sensitive end of technology. The Nasdaq Composite closed Wednesday at 26,253.34, down 0.64%, and as of 9:09 a.m. EDT Thursday TheStreet had it down a further 0.97% with the session still open. The 10-year Treasury yield ended Wednesday at 4.845%, the highest since November 2023, according to Zacks Investment Research — a level that changes the arithmetic on long-duration growth stories regardless of what a foundry in Hsinchu reports.

The next hard data point on this specific question is the same one that produced today's: TSMC's next monthly revenue disclosure, followed by its quarterly report, which will show whether the capacity coming online is translating into shipped wafers or simply moving the bottleneck. Until then, the August number establishes that the constraint in the AI supply chain remains physical.