TSMC Sets Aside Up to $1 Billion for Stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI

TSMC's board approved two new investments on Tuesday: up to $500 million for Anthropic shares at the price set in its IPO, and up to $500 million for preferred shares in OpenAI. The world's largest contract chipmaker already manufactures the processors both labs depend on, from Nvidia's GPUs to Google's TPUs. Now it will own a piece of each. On Wednesday investors sent TSMC's stock up 4.81%, and Taiwan's whole market rose with it.

Two Labs, One Supplier, Three $500 Million Checks

The resolutions are precise about form. The Anthropic stake is common stock bought at the initial public offering price, which Anthropic has set at $70 to $78 a share in a sale of 825 million shares worth up to $64.4 billion. The OpenAI stake is preferred stock in a company that is still private. Both figures are ceilings, so the final amounts can come in lower.

The same meeting approved a third $500 million: a new investment company that will take strategic stakes in semiconductor and related businesses. Market analysts quoted by Taiwan's Central News Agency read the AI investments as a sign of TSMC's optimism about the technology and of its interest in owning part of the biggest AI firms.

The logic is easy to follow. Most of the chips both labs train and run their models on come off TSMC's production lines, so a share of the labs is a bet on the same demand TSMC already serves, held from the other side of the table. For scale, the two AI stakes together equal about 2.4% of the $40.93 billion capital budget the board signed off the same day.

That budget, and the month TSMC had just closed, say more about where the demand is heading.

The Best Month in TSMC's History

On the same Tuesday, TSMC published its sales for October. They were the best of any month in its history, up 59.7% from a year earlier and 14.7% from September.

Spread across the calendar, that is roughly $575 million of sales for every day of the month. It follows a third quarter in which net profit rose 68.7% to NT$763.06 billion, and it is why the board felt comfortable raising the quarterly cash dividend to a record NT$9 per share, from NT$7.

“The October sales reflected robust global demand for AI applications. — Alex Huang, Mega International Investment Services”

The dividend goes ex on March 11, 2027 and is paid on April 8. Taiwan's National Development Fund, TSMC's largest shareholder with 1.65 billion shares, is set to receive about NT$14.88 billion of it. Investors did not wait for April.

A 4.81% Day and What the Stakes Open Up

On Wednesday TSMC's shares rose 4.81% to close at their high of the day, NT$2,395. Because TSMC accounts for more than 40% of the Taiwan Stock Exchange's value, that move alone added about 880 points to the Taiex, which closed up 3.62% at 44,257.15.

For TSMC, a seat among the shareholders of Anthropic and OpenAI is a closer view of the demand it is building for. In mid-October it kept its 2026 capital spending forecast at $60 billion to $64 billion, saying it expects strong customer demand over the next few years, including from emerging agentic AI applications. For the labs, it is a vote of confidence from the supplier that sees orders from across the industry.

What is left to settle is timing. The Anthropic purchase depends on the IPO, expected later this month, and TSMC has not published the terms of the OpenAI deal.

The factory behind the AI boom has decided to own a little of what comes out of it.