zlacker

>>fancy_+(OP)
He will announce they're selling the foundry business within the next 12-18 months. I'm certain of it.

>>DebtDe+tc
To Nvidia?

>>cubefo+Mk
It'd be the final piece of Apple's vertical integration puzzle.

>>axoltl+Qo
Apple is mostly selling mobile devices, so power efficiency is very important. Which means they need cutting edge TSMC nodes. For Nvidia, being server based, power efficiency (electricity cost) is less a concern I believe.

>>cubefo+2r
That was definitely true when the iPhone first came out. I don't know if it's true now. Given the average age of an iPhone/iPad keeps going up and up I don't think 90% of consumers are particularly bothered about it. I certainly would doubt that they would lose market share over it if their power efficiency stagnated for a couple of years, at least on an 'iPhone 16e' style chip.

For Nvidia that isn't actually the case at all. It's not electricity per se which is important, it is heat. The new(er) GB200s require liquid cooling because they put out so much heat. Virtually 0 datacentres have liquid cooling to each rack, so rollout has been extremely slow (basically have to build new datacentres from scratch).

The problem Apple has got is they are far, far too reliant on TSMC. It may be worth Apple buying Intel just as an insurance policy. It would be less than 3% of their market cap.

If TSMC goes down/decides not to serve Apple in the future (eg NVidia buying up literally all of the capacity because their products are so much more valuable than Apples)/some other TSMC related black swan event, Apple is close to toast. They get 70-80% of revenue from hardware and could end up with no hardware to sell. Every device they have cannot work without TSMC.

A great book on this btw is Apple in China by Patrick McGee.