Is the AI Boom Slowing Down? What New Chip Numbers Show

By Stock Titan Editorial Team · Published October 8, 2026

Through September the money kept coming, with two signs of easing

Both companies sold far more than a year ago, and each release also holds one sign of easing. TSMC’s September 2026 revenue report, filed with the SEC on Form 6-K, gives net revenue of NT$511.86 billion for the month, 0.6% below August 2026 and 54.6% above September 2025. Samsung’s earnings guidance for the third quarter of 2026 gives sales of approximately 195 trillion won and operating profit of approximately 107.40 trillion won, each the midpoint of a narrow range the release also prints. Neither document carries any comment from management, a split by product, or a volume.

Neither document mentions AI, and the reason to read them as AI evidence is what the two companies said in their last full reports. TSMC’s second-quarter presentation showed high-performance computing, its category for computing chips as distinct from phones, cars and other devices, at 66% of revenue and growing 20% on the quarter while smartphone revenue fell 4%. Samsung’s second-quarter results said its memory business reached its record “by proactively addressing AI demand despite limited capacity.” The October 8 figures are company-wide totals from two suppliers of AI hardware. They are the newest hard numbers available, and they cannot isolate AI demand.

Analysts had expected a little less. The consensus compiled by LSEG had put TSMC’s third-quarter revenue at NT$1.46 trillion and Samsung’s operating profit at 106.1 trillion won, so our sum for TSMC and Samsung’s guided figure are both above that compilation, by about 2% and about 1%. The US session of October 8 had not opened when we wrote this, so we report no market reaction for TSM, and Samsung’s ordinary shares do not trade on a US exchange. Our guide to guidance and consensus estimates explains how a company’s own range and an analyst average relate.

TSMC sold more than it told investors to expect

TSMC’s three monthly reports add up to a quarter that is above its own guidance and growing faster than the one before. July was NT$467.58 billion (July report), August NT$514.81 billion (August report) and September NT$511.86 billion, which makes NT$1,494.24 billion by our sum. That is 50.9% above the NT$989.92 billion of the third quarter of 2025 and 17.6% above the second quarter. The second quarter itself had grown 36.0% on the year and 12.0% on the quarter, according to TSMC’s second-quarter results release. TSMC reports the quarter itself on October 15, and its figure can differ slightly from a sum of monthly reports.

In that July release TSMC guided third-quarter revenue to between US$44.6 billion and US$45.8 billion. It used an exchange rate of 32 NT dollars to the US dollar for its margin guidance, and converting the revenue range at that same 32, which is our conversion, gives NT$1,427.2 billion to NT$1,465.6 billion. The three months sit 2.0% above the top of it.

Show the data

Item	Low	High	Value
3Q26 revenue	1,427.2	1,465.6	1,494.2

The US dollar figure depends on the quarter’s average exchange rate, which TSMC publishes with its results. The Federal Reserve’s daily rates for the NT dollar average 32.00 over July 1 to September 30, 2026 by our calculation, which makes the quarter about US$46.7 billion, and about 41% above the US$33.10 billion TSMC reported for the third quarter of 2025. Beating its own range is something TSMC has done before. In each of the four quarters from 3Q 2025 to 2Q 2026 its reported US dollar revenue was at or above the top of the guided range, according to its presentations for 3Q 2025, 4Q 2025, 1Q 2026 and 2Q 2026.

Show the data

Category	Value
Jan	401
Feb	318
Mar	415
Apr	411
May	417
Jun	443
Jul	468
Aug	515
Sep	512

Then there is the flat month, the first of the two soft spots. September came in 0.6% under August, and the report gives no comment on it. What the filings do show is that the step up happened in August, when revenue rose 10.1% on July, and that September held almost all of it. A year earlier September also came in a little under August (by 1.4%), so growth on the year barely moved between the two months, from 53.3% to 54.6%. TSMC’s single months swing a good deal, as the dip in February on the chart shows. One flat month after a jump cannot by itself tell a pause from the ordinary timing of shipments.

Samsung has the other soft spot. Its guided sales are about 2.3 times the third quarter of 2025, yet the last three steps from one quarter to the next have each been smaller than the one before. Samsung reported increases of 43% for the first quarter and 28% for the second, and the guidance works out to 13.7%.

Currency may explain some of the latest step, though Samsung does not say how much of its sales it earns in dollars. By our averages of the Federal Reserve’s daily rates the won strengthened from about 1,500 per US dollar in the second quarter to about 1,417 in the third, so the same sales in US dollars grew about 20% (from roughly $114 billion to roughly $138 billion). That conversion is our illustration, since Samsung publishes no dollar total.

Memory chip makers keep the most profit, in the reports we read

Of the companies whose reports we read, the two that sell only memory keep the largest share of each sale as profit. Operating profit is what is left of sales after the cost of making the product and running the business, before interest and tax, and the operating margin is that profit as a share of sales. Samsung’s was 14.1% in the third quarter of 2025 and is about 55.1% in this guidance.

Show the data

Category	Value
3Q25	14.1%
4Q25	21.4%
1Q26	42.8%
2Q26	52.2%
3Q26 guidance	55.1%

Samsung’s guidance does not say which business earned the money, and its last full report suggests where to look. In the second quarter the Device Solutions division, which holds memory, chip design and contract chip manufacturing, posted 89.2 trillion won of operating profit on 127.5 trillion won of sales. That was 99.7% of the whole company’s operating profit, while its phone and its television and appliance businesses reported operating losses.

One comparison gives a sense of scale. At the quarter’s average exchange rates Samsung’s guided operating profit is about US$76 billion, and TSMC’s entire revenue for the same quarter is about US$46.7 billion, so one company’s guided operating profit is about 1.6 times the other’s quarterly revenue by our sum. The arithmetic behind it is that Samsung’s sales are about three times TSMC’s and it guides to keeping 55% of them. It sets a profit against a revenue, and Samsung also sells phones and televisions, so it shows size and says nothing by itself about who has more pricing power. At the latest daily rate in the Federal Reserve’s table (1,345.75 won on October 2), the same profit is about US$80 billion.

The two pure memory makers report wider margins still. SK hynix reported a 76% operating margin for the second quarter of 2026 (its release), and Micron’s GAAP operating income was 80.7% of revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended September 3, 2026 (Micron’s release). TSMC’s operating margin of 60.3% in its second quarter was below both and above Samsung’s company-wide figure, though the periods and accounting bases are not identical. We looked at how long memory margins like these have lasted before in our article on Micron’s results and the memory cycle, and our explainer on operating margin sets out what the ratio includes.

TSMC is shipping more and earning more on each wafer

TSMC publishes revenue and wafer shipments, which lets us calculate revenue per wafer, and Samsung’s releases give no comparable shipment figure. The difference matters because the two kinds of growth have different limits.

In our reading, shipment growth is limited by how much production capacity suppliers can bring online, and Samsung said in its second-quarter results that supply constraints were expected to continue despite efforts to increase production. Growth from price depends on buyers continuing to pay more, and the research firm TrendForce wrote in a release of September 30, 2026 that, for conventional DRAM in the fourth quarter, “the pace of contract price increases is expected to moderate.”

TSMC is the one company here that publishes a physical volume, the number of wafers (the silicon discs chips are cut from) it ships each quarter. In the second quarter of 2026 it shipped 4,336 thousand wafers, 16.6% more than a year earlier, while revenue in US dollars rose 33.7% (2Q 2026 presentation). Dividing one by the other, revenue per shipped wafer went from about US$8,088 to about US$9,271, a rise of 14.6%. Splitting the growth by the logarithm of each factor puts about 53% of it on shipments and about 47% on revenue per wafer.

Show the data

Category	Wafer shipments	Revenue per shipped wafer (US$)
3Q24	100	100
4Q24	102	112
1Q25	98	111
2Q25	111	115
3Q25	122	115
4Q25	119	121
1Q26	125	122
2Q26	130	132

Revenue per wafer is our division and a blended figure, never a price list. It rises when TSMC charges more, when customers move to newer and dearer manufacturing processes, and when revenue that is not wafers, such as chip packaging, grows. TSMC’s presentations give no selling price, so those causes cannot be pulled apart, and none of the figures isolates AI chips. All of it is second-quarter data too.

For the third quarter the number to hold in mind is about 5.04 million wafers, 16% more than in the second quarter, which is what TSMC would need to have shipped for revenue per wafer to stay level on about US$46.7 billion of sales. A count below that means revenue per wafer rose again. We make no forecast of which side it lands on.

At Samsung the clue is how much of the new money turned into profit. Sales rose by 23.5 trillion won from the second quarter and operating profit rose by 17.91 trillion won, so about 76% of the extra sales reached operating profit. Several things can produce a share that high. Higher prices would, since a price rise adds sales without adding cost. So would a shift toward dearer products, or more output from factories whose costs are largely fixed, and one-time items and the exchange rate move it as well. The guidance alone cannot say which did the most.

Samsung’s earlier releases name price as one contributor. In its second-quarter results of July 30, 2026 it wrote, “The continued industry-wide upward trend of prices also contributed to the record earnings.” Its first-quarter release of April 30, 2026 credited “higher average selling price (ASP)” and said the memory business set its sales record “despite limited supply availability.” Limited capacity, rising prices and a profit that grew faster than sales (20.0% against 13.7% on the quarter) are consistent with price contributing to the third quarter’s profit growth. That is our reading, and how large the contribution was is unknown, since Samsung has published no shipment or price figure for any memory product in the releases we read.

Spending, costs and prices could change the picture

The other end of these numbers is the spending on data centres and computing, and one large spender’s own report shows how heavy its capital spending has become. Alphabet reported purchases of property and equipment of $44.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026 in its results release, about double the $22.4 billion of a year earlier, and its free cash flow (cash from operations minus that spending) was negative by $5.9 billion for the quarter. The same release says that in June 2026 it raised net proceeds of $49.6 billion from new common and convertible preferred stock “to be used for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute.” That is one company and one quarter, the only cloud filing we read.

Higher component prices also land on the companies that build phones and laptops. Samsung’s second-quarter release shows it inside Samsung itself, where the mobile and networks businesses posted an operating loss of 0.7 trillion won and “earnings declined due to elevated component cost pressures across the industry.” Samsung did not name memory there. TrendForce made the link for the industry in a release of September 30, 2026, writing that “rising costs and the depletion of low-cost inventories continue to weigh on smartphone production.”

That same TrendForce release is the nearest thing to an outside reading on price. It projects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 10% to 15% in the fourth quarter of 2026 and NAND flash contract prices to rise 15% to 20%, with DRAM still undersupplied, and it is where the sentence about the pace of increases moderating comes from. Those are TrendForce’s forecasts and we pass them on as such. Samsung’s operating margin also rose by a smaller amount this quarter, from 52.2% to about 55.1%, which measures slower margin expansion without identifying what happened to memory prices.

The next three weeks of earnings fill in the gaps

The two full reports arrive within three weeks, and they hold most of what these releases leave out. TSMC’s investor relations quarterly results page lists its third-quarter earnings conference for Thursday, October 15, 2026, and Samsung’s investor relations events page lists its third-quarter earnings call for October 29, 2026.

At TSMC, shipments against the 5.04 million mark show whether revenue per wafer rose or fell. Its guidance for the fourth quarter gives the first company view of the months after the flat September. For reference, three months at September’s level would be NT$1,535.6 billion, 2.8% above the third quarter, or about US$48.0 billion at 32 NT dollars to the US dollar. TSMC’s July presentation put 2026 revenue growth at “slightly above 40% in US dollar terms.”

At Samsung, the split by business shows whether chips again account for nearly all of the profit, and the share of extra sales reaching profit can be recalculated from the final figures. The cloud companies’ reports, when they come, show whether spending like Alphabet’s is still rising.

These two releases cannot show whether AI spending keeps growing from here, and we make no forecast of it. They show that through September two of the industry’s suppliers were still selling far more than a year earlier, with a flat month at TSMC and smaller quarterly steps at Samsung. We worked from the companies’ own published figures and the Federal Reserve’s exchange rates, with the method stated beside each calculation, and how we source and check articles is set out in our editorial policy.

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