TSMC Eyes Record March Revenue as NVIDIA Corners CoWoS Advanced Packaging Supply

TSMC's March 2026 consolidated revenue is expected to set another record high, ahead of the company's April 16 earnings call. TrendForce reports Q1 2026 guidance of US$34.6 to US$35.8 billion — a figure that would make it one of the strongest quarters in TSMC's history. AI chip demand from NVIDIA, Apple, AMD, and Broadcom continues to drive unprecedented wafer starts at TSMC's leading-edge nodes.

CNBC reported on April 8 that NVIDIA has reserved the majority of TSMC's CoWoS-L advanced packaging capacity for its Blackwell GPU line. The demand for CoWoS is so severe that TSMC has outsourced portions of the work to ASE and Amkor — substrate and packaging specialists — while simultaneously expanding two new advanced packaging facilities in Arizona. TSMC's CoWoS capacity is growing at roughly 80% compound annual growth rate, but AI demand continues to outpace supply at every step.

The CoWoS constraint has created secondary effects across the semiconductor supply chain. Companies unable to secure CoWoS allocations from TSMC are turning to Intel's EMIB technology as an alternative, a dynamic TrendForce flagged in a separate April 7 report citing Google and Amazon as potential Intel packaging customers. For TSMC, the packaging bottleneck represents both a challenge and an opportunity: the company is investing heavily to expand capacity, but the lead times for new packaging lines are measured in years, meaning today's constraint is unlikely to ease before mid-2027 at the earliest.