A recent Jensen Huang declaration and fresh chip production industry rumors have coalesced nigh simultaneously. During a sitdown with Jodi Shelton—on her "A Bit Personal with..." podcast—the Team Green boss made a lofty claim when asked about his confident approach when conducting business: "well, you know, it's rough to know everything—I'm just kidding...By the way, Morris (Chang) will be happy to know (that) NVIDIA is TSMC's largest customer now." Almost perfectly timed industry whispers have emerged—within the past day or two—suggesting Taiwan's leading foundry service adjusting its supply relationship with Apple. Previous to current tremors, the Cupertino-headquartered giant has reportedly enjoyed priority access to cutting-edge node processes. Yesterday morning, the "Fixed-focus Digital Cameras" Weibo account let slip about a speculated trip, stateside, made by TSMC's Che-Chia Wei.

The short blog entry alleged that the TSMC CEO visited: "Apple HQ (in order) to demand the largest price increase in recent years, and Apple may no longer enjoy priority production capacity. TSMC's largest customer is now NVIDIA, accounting for nearly 13% of total revenue." The two fabless rivals seemingly want unobstructed access to 2 nm wafer production lines, but Team Green has supposedly got the edge here—very likely driven by successes in the AI enterprise field. According to fairly fresh inside track information, Apple has secured around half of TSMC's 2 nm manufacturing capacity—linked to forthcoming A20 and A20 Pro smartphone chipsets. In terms of proprietary AI server-grade designs, the house of Mac and iPhone is reported to be working on an inference-only "Baltra" GPU project . Industry moles have mentioned a selection of TSMC 3 nm N3E or N3P nodes for this fairly distant-from-launch prospect.