Hardware Ready Ready to Bench?
The TSMC board of directors approved, on November 10, a combined investment that can reach up to 1 billion dollars in the companies OpenAI and Anthropic. The operation involves the purchase of ordinary shares of Anthropic for a maximum of 500 million dollars at the price set in its initial public offering (IPO) and an analogous tranche destined for the acquisition of preferred stock of OpenAI.
Anthropic recently launched the roadshow ahead of its listing on Nasdaq with the ticker ANT, offering 825 million Class A shares at a price between 70 and 78 dollars each. The overall valuation could reach 1.405 billion dollars, surpassing the 965 billion assigned in the 65 billion Series H round concluded in May.
TSMC investment: why it matters
The overall operation, which also includes other cornerstone investors such as Google, AMD and Nvidia, could lead to a raise of up to 64.4 billion dollars, plus an additional 26 billion. TSMC currently produces custom chips for Apple in its most advanced facilities.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are developing proprietary processors and compete with the Cupertino company for access to the industry’s most sought-after production capacity. In particular, OpenAI is working on hardware solutions designed to directly challenge Apple in its own domain.
The board of directors also authorized the establishment of a new vehicle company capitalized up to 500 million dollars, dedicated to strategic investments in the semiconductor industry and its related ecosystem. The details emerge from Form 6-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which frames the three operations within the same board meeting.
The financial context highlights the importance of this move: the board simultaneously allocated 40,926.70 million dollars for production capacity and technological research. The third quarter of 2026 closed with consolidated revenues equal to 1.494.24 billion NT$ (New Taiwan Dollar) and a net profit of 763.06 billion NT$.
What changes and what are the effects
TSMC shares rose by more than 4% after the news, helped also by the 60% year-on-year increase in sales recorded in October. It is not yet clear how TSMC intends to manage a client portfolio in which funded companies become, at the same time, competitors of one of its most important clients.
Diversifying revenues through shareholding in the companies driving demand for advanced production capacity represents a financially understandable strategy. This operation further ties the fate of the Taiwanese giant to a sector, that of generative AI, which in recent months has seen funding rounds, valuations and promises of proprietary hardware multiply at a pace no silicon manufacturer can afford to ignore.
Source and further reading on TSMC investment: original article.
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