TSMC to Lift Chip Prices Up to 10% From 2027, Nikkei Reports

TSMC is telling customers that wafer prices are going up again in 2027, and this time the increase reaches into the mature nodes as well as the leading edge. According to Nikkei Asia's reporting, base price increases will run in the 5% to 10% range depending on customer and product, take effect at the start of 2027, and cover both advanced and mature production. Negotiations reportedly began in June and wrapped in July.

The more interesting piece is the mature-node hike. 12nm, 16nm and 28nm face increases of up to 10%, which is described as the first broad mature-node price increase in more than three years. That matters because mature nodes are where automotive, industrial and consumer parts live, and those customers have been used to fairly stable pricing while all the drama happened at 3nm and 2nm. If TSMC is pushing through 10% there too, the cost pressure is not just an AI-margin story.

On the leading edge, coverage from Tom's Hardware frames this as hitting "all advanced nodes," which it puts at about 74% of TSMC's wafer business, with Nvidia, AMD, Apple and Qualcomm on the receiving end. TSMC's stated rationale is rising costs for materials, manufacturing equipment, and construction of new plants overseas, meaning the Arizona, Kumamoto and Dresden fabs the company has been standing up outside Taiwan. A TSMC spokesperson's line, as reported by The Star, is that "Our pricing strategy is strategic, not opportunistic."

The honest caveat is that this is single-sourced reporting via Nikkei citing unnamed sources, TSMC does not confirm pricing, and the article does not break the 5-10% band down by specific node, by customer tier, or by geography of the fab producing the wafer. Take the range as reported, not as a settled schedule. What the reporting also does not give you is how much of the hike is genuinely input-cost recovery versus TSMC exercising the pricing power its roughly 90% share at the leading nodes affords it.

Either way, if you are a fabless design house planning 2027 product margin, the assumption of flat wafer pricing is gone, and the second-source conversations at Samsung and Intel Foundry just got a bit more oxygen.