(00:00:00) TSMC Earnings, Meta Iris & the CoWoS Crunch That Defines 2026
(00:00:54) Nvidia CoWoS Lock-In vs. AMD Squeeze
(00:01:33) TSMC Record Revenue, Thursday Earnings Watch
(00:02:06) Meta Iris and Alphabet TPU Challenge Nvidia
(00:02:40) Intel Ireland and Samsung HBM5 Hiring
(00:03:09) Energy Shock Hits AI Stock Valuations

The CoWoS bottleneck refuses to ease — and this episode explains exactly why it matters for every investor, engineer, and tech professional tracking the AI infrastructure cycle.

TSMC's two new advanced packaging plants in Chiayi are real progress, but the supply-demand gap for CoWoS capacity is only expected to narrow from roughly 20% to 10% by year-end. Demand is projected to hit one million wafers in 2026, up from 370,000 in 2024. TSMC is expanding at around 80% annually. It still won't be enough, and the structural gap now runs confirmed through at least 2026.

Inside that bottleneck, the competitive dynamics are sharp. Nvidia holds approximately 60% of total CoWoS output and has already locked in more than 50% of the 2026-2027 expansion. AMD sits at just 11%, scaling both CPUs and GPUs through the same constrained pipe simultaneously — a structural disadvantage that puts its 70x forward earnings multiple at risk from even a minor packaging miss.

TSMC's Q2 revenue hit an all-time record of approximately 1.27 trillion New Taiwan dollars, with N3 and CoWoS sold out through year-end. Thursday's earnings call on July 16 is the next proof point: watch capex guidance, not the headline number.

On the hyperscaler front, Meta is accelerating its Iris custom chip to production in September, and Alphabet is now commercialising TPU capacity externally through a neocloud offering. Both moves signal a deliberate effort to build parallel supply chains away from Nvidia.

Rounding out the episode: Intel's €5 billion Leixlip expansion, Samsung's aggressive HBM4 and HBM5 hiring push, and a Monday oil-price shock that sent Nvidia back to the $200 support level — a reminder that energy cost is now actively priced as a material risk to data centre ROI.

This episode includes AI-generated content.