TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — TSMC’s global foundry market share reached 70.4% in the fourth quarter of last year as demand for AI chips surged, TrendForce said Thursday.

The research firm said the world’s largest contract chipmaker benefited from demand for chips used in AI servers, GPUs, Google’s tensor processing units, and other specialized processors, per UDN.

TrendForce said the world’s top 10 foundries generated about NT$5.39 trillion (US$169.5 billion) in revenue in 2025, up 26.3% from a year earlier and a record high, per Liberty Times. In 2026, early consumer electronics stockpiling in the first half may stabilize factory utilization, though high memory prices could weaken demand later in the year.

TSMC’s wafer shipments dipped slightly in the fourth quarter, but demand for new flagship smartphone chips, mainly for the iPhone 17, boosted its advanced 3 nm shipments. Higher average selling prices lifted revenue 2% to about NT$1.07 trillion, keeping TSMC firmly in first place.

Samsung Electronics ranked second, with fourth-quarter revenue rising 6.7% to nearly NT$108.12 billion. Shipments of new 2 nm chips and logic dies for HBM4 memory helped the company return to profit and raise its market share to 7.1%.

China’s SMIC placed third, with revenue rising 4.5% to about NT$79.18 billion, supported by domestic demand as Beijing pushes to localize semiconductor supply chains. Taiwan’s UMC ranked fourth, with revenue edging up to about NT$63.6 billion as orders for 8-inch and 12-inch wafers remained steady.

Other companies posted mixed results. GlobalFoundries’ revenue rose 8.4% to NT$57.24 billion on demand for data center components, while Hua Hong Semiconductor reported about NT$38.80 billion in revenue.

Tower Semiconductor climbed to seventh place as demand for specialized server technologies such as silicon photonics and silicon-germanium chips grew. Vanguard, Nexchip, and PSMC rounded out the top 10 with stable or slightly lower quarterly revenue.