By VIRA Broadcasting
TAIPEI — One Elon Musk post. Billions of dollars moved. And Intel just watched its foundry dream take a body blow.
TSMC shares smashed records Monday after Musk confirmed over the weekend that the Taiwanese chip giant is in talks to join Terafab, his planned Texas chipmaking venture. Taiwan-listed shares touched NT$2,580 intraday, up 3.2%, pushing the company’s market value to NT$66.9 trillion and lifting Taiwan’s benchmark index to a record 49,712. The U.S.-listed ADR hit an intraday record of $487.44 and closed up 2.8% at $485.80, making TSMC Investor’s Business Daily’s Stock of the Day.
The loser in this trade was unmistakable: Intel. Shares slid more than 4% in premarket trading and stayed down. Intel had joined Terafab back in April as the only named technology partner, with its 14A process. Now TSMC — the company that actually knows how to manufacture at scale — is circling the same project, and the market is doing brutal math about what that means for Intel’s foundry comeback.
“Just discussions, but something may come of it,” Musk wrote on X Saturday. He added “true” to a post calling Terafab “absurdly massive” and saying anything TSMC contributes would be “supplemental.” That was enough. Per Tim Culpan’s Culpium newsletter, the likeliest structure has TSMC building and operating a fab exclusively serving Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI.
The Terafab buzz landed on top of an already-scorching demand story: Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and MediaTek have raised 2-nanometer orders by 10% to 20%, per Taiwan’s EDN, pushing TSMC’s monthly 2nm capacity toward 120,000 wafers by year-end — well above earlier estimates. JPMorgan reiterated its Buy rating Oct. 1 and lifted its price target to NT$3,300. High-performance computing is now 66% of TSMC’s revenue.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for Intel: Musk just told the world he might hand his chip factory to the one company that has never needed his help. Intel’s entire foundry pitch is “we can be the Western alternative to TSMC.” If TSMC walks into Terafab, that pitch is ashes.
Sources: Investor’s Business Daily (Oct. 5), The Financial Economy (Oct. 5), Finimize (Oct. 5).
Is Intel’s foundry comeback dead on arrival — or does Musk still need a Plan B in case TSMC walks away?
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