TSMC

Refresh delta (since 2026-07-24)

What changed — six material moves

1. July revenue accelerated, hard. NT$467.58B, +5.6% MoM and +44.7% YoY; Jan–Jul cumulative NT$2,872.06B, +37.0% YoY [primary: SEC EDGAR 6-K, accession 0001046179-26-000471, filed 2026-08-10, "TSMC July 2026 Revenue Report"]. July alone ran +10.4% above the Q2 monthly average of NT$423.46B.

2. The board appropriated US$29,442.50 million of capacity capital in one resolution — the first hard, TSMC-filed capexCapital expenditureMoney spent on long-lived things — buildings, machines, servers — rather than on running costs. dollar figure this shelf has ever held. Purposes stated verbatim: "1) Installation and upgrade of advanced technology capacity; 2) Installation and upgrade of advanced packaging, mature and/or specialty technology capacity; 3) Fab construction, and installation of fab facility systems" [primary: 6-K accession 0001046179-26-000536, filed 2026-08-11, "TSMC Board of Directors Meeting Resolutions"]. This is an appropriation, not FY capex guidance — see the provenance warning in §"The capexCapital expenditureMoney spent on long-lived things — buildings, machines, servers — rather than on running costs. figure, finally, and what it is not".

3. H1 2026 capex now clears the primary bar: NT$846.76B ≈ US$26.80B, against H1 2025's NT$628.05B ≈ US$19.88B — +34.8% YoY [primary: 6-K accession 0001046179-26-000541, filed 2026-08-14, Exhibit 99.1 "Consolidated Financial Statements for the Six Months Ended June 30, 2026 … pursuant to Taiwan-IFRSs", consolidated statements of cash flows, "Acquisitions of: Property, plant and equipment"; USD at the Q2 actual average NT$31.60/US$1.00 from the 2Q26 Management Report]. This retires a gap that had been carried unverified across four consecutive passes (07-10, 07-14, 07-16, 07-24).

4. A new joint venture with Sony Semiconductor Solutions. "Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation," Koshi City, Kumamoto — next-generation smartphone image sensors, volume production expected 2029. Sony contributes ~¥465B and is sole controlling shareholder (the JV consolidates into Sony, not TSMC); TSMC contributes ~¥282B in cash, phased on demand; further capacity investment is premised on Japanese government support [primary: 6-K accession 0001046179-26-000539, filed 2026-08-11, joint Sony/TSMC release; the ¥282B subscription cap was separately approved as board resolution 4 in accession 0001046179-26-000536].

5. Q2 dividend NT$7.0/share, and a first: a USD election for foreign holders. Record date 2026-12-16, ex-date 2026-12-10 (same ex-date for ADSs), payable 2027-01-07. "[P]ursuant to the amended regulations of the Taiwan Financial Supervisory Commission, TSMC will, starting with this dividend distribution, provide foreign shareholders … with the option to receive cash dividends in U.S. dollars" [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000536, resolution 2]. Separately, the Q1'26 dividend was mechanically adjusted to NT$7.00000137 per share after restricted-stock reclamation [primary: 6-K accession 0001046179-26-000552, filed 2026-09-01].

6. Balance sheet at 2026-06-30, primary and stronger: cash and equivalents NT$3,134.22B ≈ US$99.2B; bonds payable gross NT$980.36B ≈ US$31.0B (domestic NT$554.84B + overseas NT$427.70B − NT$2.17B discounts); long-term bank loans NT$49.23B; total equity NT$6,474.47B on total assets NT$9,375.65B. Net cash ≈ NT$2,104.6B ≈ US$66.6B [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000541 Ex-99.1, balance sheet + Note 17; net-cash arithmetic is over primary inputs]. H1 operating cash flow NT$1,482.34B ≈ US$46.9B, +32.0% YoY; implied H1 free cash flowFree cash flowCash left after paying to run and maintain the business. Unlike profit, it is hard to flatter with accounting choices. ≈ US$20.1B.

What held

The structural thesis is unchanged and better evidenced. The foundry + advanced-packaging chokepoint, the customer concentration, the geopolitical tail — nothing in the window touched them. What the window did was convert two long-standing summary-derived numbers (capex level, balance-sheet strength) into primary ones, and add one genuinely new fact (the ¥282B Sony JV) that is small relative to the base but tells you TSMC is now willing to put capital into a JV it does not control.

Nothing cracked. No regulatory action, no management change, no customer loss, no guidance cut in the window.

Phase B — Measure performance

Earnings result — REFRESHED

The Q2 2026 print itself (2026-07-16) is fully analysed in the previous dossier and is not restated here. Three things have been added to it since:

(a) The board formally approved the quarter. "Approved the 2026 second quarter Business Report and Financial Statements. Second quarter consolidated revenue was NT$1,270.38 billion and net income was NT$706.56 billion, with diluted earnings per share of NT$27.25" [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000536]. This is an independent third confirmation of the three headline figures — they now agree across the 07-16 earnings release, the IR management report, and the board minute.

(b) The reviewed six-month statements landed (2026-08-14) and carry the cash-flow and balance-sheet detail the press release never had. Ingested above. The Taiwan-IFRS six-month statements are the only document on this shelf that states capex as a cash outflow.

(c) The Q3 print is not the next catalyst — the August monthly report is. As of 2026-09-05 the August 2026 revenue 6-K has not been filed [primary-negative: EDGAR submissions index for CIK 0001046179 read 2026-09-05; the most recent filings of any type are the 2026-09-01 dividend adjustment and a run of Form 4s]. TSMC's monthly cadence puts it around 2026-09-10. The earnings-manual.json note for TSMC already flags this: the monthly print "is a higher-frequency catalyst than the quarterly print and is not modelled anywhere in this system." It still isn't.

Earnings calls — NOT REFRESHED, and the gap is now four passes old

transcripts/ remains empty. No call occurred in the window (the next is the Q3 call, expected 2026-10-15), so there is nothing new to ingest — but the Q1'26, Q4'25 and Q3'25 backfill that the previous dossier listed as an open item is still outstanding, and the deep-dive skill's own rule is explicit that a refresh which adds zero primary material to a shallow shelf is a refresh done wrong. This pass added six filings and zero transcripts. Flagged, not fixed.

Price & catalysts — REFRESHED

Price: $427.98 last, 2026-09-05. Prior close $417.01 — the name moved +2.63% on the day of this refresh, on no TSMC filing (nothing was filed 2026-09-04 or 09-05 except Form 4s). 52-week high $478.89 was set within the last 13 weeks, i.e. post-print; the stock has given back ~11% from it.

The Q3 revenue guide, converted to the monthly cadence — a check a reader can run on 2026-09-10 in one line. The guide is $44.6–45.8B at TSMC's own stated FX assumption of NT$32/US$1.00 [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000451, EX-99.1, verified twice already on this shelf]. That is NT$1,427.2–1,465.6B for Q3. July printed NT$467.58B. So August + September must total NT$959.6–998.0B — a monthly average of NT$479.8–499.0B, i.e. +2.6% to +6.7% above July's level . An August print below ~NT$480B does not by itself miss the guide (September is seasonally the stronger month) but it puts the low end of the band in play. This is a mechanical decomposition, not a forecast.

The capex figure, finally, and what it is not

The 07-24 verification note's central finding was that the $52–56B FY2026 capex guide had never appeared in any TSMC-filed document, having been carried from earnings-call aggregators across three passes. That finding still stands. The two capex numbers this pass adds do not confirm it, and conflating them would be exactly the error the 07-24 note was written to prevent:

• US$29,442.50M is a board CAPITAL APPROPRIATION — an authorization to spend, approved at one meeting, with no stated period. TSMC's board appropriates capital several times a year; the July month-end 6-K explicitly records "The capital appropriations approved by TSMC board of directors: None" for July [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000545, filed 2026-08-25], which is what makes the August figure a discrete tranche rather than a running total. It is not a full-year capex guide and must never be labelled as one.
• US$26.80B is the H1 2026 cash capex actual — a realized cash outflow, primary, and the first one this shelf holds. Against a $52–56B full-year reported guide it implies US$25.2–29.2B in H2, i.e. H1 was tracking the low-to-middle of the range on a straight-line read.

Status of the $52–56B figure: still summary-derived, still uncorroborated by any TSMC-filed document, now in its fifth consecutive pass. The correct next move is the Q3 earnings call transcript, where the number is actually spoken.

Management & capital allocation — REFRESHED (the window touched it)

Three capital-allocation decisions in a single board meeting, all primary:

• US$29.4B appropriated to capacity — advanced technology, advanced packaging, and fab construction, in that order in the resolution's own wording.
• ¥282B into a JV TSMC does not control. The Sony structure is unusual for TSMC: Sony is "sole controlling shareholder," appoints the Representative Director, and consolidates the entity. TSMC is putting cash and process technology into a Kumamoto image-sensor venture for a 2029 production start, with further capacity investment explicitly contingent on Japanese government support. Read alongside JASM (the existing Kumamoto foundry JV), this is the second Japanese structure where TSMC takes a technology-and-capital role rather than an operating one.
• The USD dividend election is a small but real friction reduction for the foreign holder base and, notably, is TSMC acting on the first distribution the amended FSC rules allowed.

Two bond tranches were issued in July: NT$14.0B at 2.03% (5-year) and NT$4.5B at 2.10% (10-year), bullet repayment, annual interest [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000545]. A company with US$66.6B of net cash issuing 10-year paper at 2.10% is funding the capex wave at a cost of capital well below its own returns; that is a choice, not a necessity.

Lens 12 + 13 · Bull / bear, and the devil's advocate — REFRESHED

Bull, restated on this window's evidence: revenue growth is accelerating, not decelerating — July's +44.7% YoY is above the Jan–Jul +37.0% cumulative, which is above the FY guide of "slightly above 40%" in USD [primary: the July 6-K; the FY guide from accession 0001046179-26-000451 EX-99.2 "Future Outlook"]. The company is funding a US$29.4B capacity tranche out of US$46.9B of half-year operating cash flow while holding US$66.6B net cash and issuing 10-year debt at 2.10%. Reported 2027 price increases of 5–10% across advanced and mature nodes, with a further 10–15% on above-forecast orders, land on a book that is already sold out.

Bear, restated: the price says the market has already paid for this. The stock is below its pre-print level after a three-for-three beat and ~11% off a high set inside the window — the classic shape of a name where the good news is in the number and the risk is in the multiple. Capex is compounding: +34.8% YoY in H1 with a US$29.4B tranche appropriated on top, which is a depreciation wave arriving in 2027–28 whether or not AI demand does. The Sony JV is a small dollar amount but it is capital going into a structure TSMC does not control, on a 2029 payback, partly dependent on a foreign government's subsidy decision. And the Taiwan tail is untouched by any of this.

Devil's advocate — the strongest argument against the bull case, stated properly: Every number in this refresh is a supply number. Revenue, capex, appropriations, capacity — TSMC is telling you how much it is building and shipping. Nothing in the window is a demand number from an end market. The customer concentration means one hyperscaler capex decision moves the whole book, and the one place demand durability actually gets discussed — the earnings call — is precisely the document this shelf has never had. A refresh built entirely on filings is structurally blind to the question that decides the thesis. That is not a reason to doubt the print; it is a reason to weight the Q3 call heavily and to notice that four passes have now flagged the missing transcripts.

Carried forward (not re-run this pass)

• Lens 1 · Company overview — unchanged, see the previous dossier.
• Lens 2 · Supply chain — unchanged, see the previous dossier. Nothing in the window disclosed a supplier or chokepoint change.
• Lens 3 · Moats — unchanged, see the previous dossier.
• Lens 4 · Segments — unchanged; the last platform/node mix is the 2Q26 one in the previous dossier. Monthly 6-Ks carry no segment split.
• Lens 7 · Comps — not re-run. No sourced peer multiples were pulled this pass; per the skill's provenance rule that makes this n/a rather than a carried-forward table.
• Lens 10 · Red flags — no new SEC Litigation Release or AAER named TSMC in the window; the only shareholding changes disclosed were two VPs each acquiring 5,000 shares in July, and a NT$0.7B equity-investment disposition [primary: accession 0001046179-26-000545]. Nothing to flag.
• Lens 11 · Projection — not re-run, deliberately. model.xlsx does not exist on this shelf and the CSVs are header-only, so there is no workbook to rebuild and read back; re-forecasting from the prior dossier's estimates without that spine would be stacked on. See Open items.
• Lens 14 · Management questions — carried from the previous dossier, with three additions in the position seed below.

Web-sourced items in the window — all summary-derived, none primary

Flagged separately so they are never mistaken for filings:

• 2027 price increases. Nikkei Asia reported TSMC will raise prices ~5–10% on advanced nodes (7nm and below) and up to 10% on mature nodes (12/16/28nm) from the start of 2027, with a further 10–15% on orders above clients' original projections; negotiations reportedly completed in July [summary-derived: Nikkei Asia via TechSpot, published 2026-07-22; corroborated by Tom's Hardware]. Note the date — this broke two days BEFORE the delta boundary and was never captured on this shelf, so it is new to the record even though it is not new to the world. No TSMC press release or filing states it; TSMC has not confirmed it.
• N2 ramp and CoWoS capacity — NOTHING NEW. Searched the window explicitly. Every figure in circulation (CoWoSCoWoSTSMC’s method of packing a processor and its memory onto one carrier so they sit close together. Supply of it has been a hard limit on how many AI chips can be built. toward 115–140k wpm by end-2026; N2 capacity ~90k wpm 2026 → 150k 2027 → 200k 2028; 2nm/A16 ~70% capacity CAGR 2026–28; CoWoS supply-demand gap narrowing 20%→10%) traces to the May–June 2026 technology-forum cycle or to the Q2 call — all of it predates the delta boundary. No new primary or dated disclosure on N2 or CoWoS landed between 2026-07-24 and 2026-09-05. The 07-16 call remains the last word.
• US fab milestones — no primary in the window. Reported status is Fab 21 Phase 2 construction complete with tool move-in during Q3 2026 and N3 high-volume production targeted 2027; two of the newly announced Arizona fabs at N2-and-below [summary-derived: aggregator coverage, undated in several cases]. TSMC's own newsroom published no Arizona release in the window — the press-release index runs 2026-07-13, 07-16, 08-10, 08-11 ×2 and nothing since [primary-negative: pr.tsmc.com English release index, read 2026-09-05]. Treat the Arizona timeline as unconfirmed.

Could not verify (this pass)

• The FY2026 capex guide of $52–56B — fifth consecutive pass; not in any TSMC-filed document. The US$29.4B appropriation is a different object and is not evidence for it.
• The 2027 price increases — single-origin (Nikkei Asia) reporting, no TSMC confirmation.
• CoWoS forward booking / sold-out-through-2027, and the HPC revenue-mix percentage — call- and slide-resident; transcripts/ is empty, so structurally unreachable from this shelf.
• Arizona construction and tool-move-in status — no TSMC release in the window; aggregator-only.
• The Q3 2026 earnings date (2026-10-15) — carried at firmness estimated from research/calendars/earnings-manual.json, itself explicitly unverified against investor.tsmc.com's financial calendar.