December of this year is the payday for TSMC’s R&D team. TSMC is one of the world's most advanced chip manufacturing companies and has established a foothold in the Arm-based microprocessor market over the years. At the same time, TSMC has also demonstrated its ability to keep pace with U.S. chipmaker Intel Corp. in making chips with the smallest feature sizes.

Unofficial reports today claim that TSMC is expected to begin mass production of leading 2nm chips in 2025. In fact, at the end of 2023, the market discussion has shifted from TSMC's "N" product series to the "A" product series. Like Intel, TSMC will use "A" to represent advanced process.

When Taiwan's stock market closed earlier today, TSMC's market capitalization on the Taipei Stock Exchange was NT$15.38 trillion. TSMC is Taiwan's most valuable company in U.S. dollar terms, and recent optimism about artificial intelligence has further fueled its rise in market capitalization.

TSMC’s American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) have a market capitalization of $497 billion, more than twice that of Intel. However, Intel's stock price is up 88% so far this year, so under the leadership of CEO Patrick Gelsinger, Intel may be about to turn a corner.

Although TSMC declined to confirm that it has paid any bonuses for the successful development of N-series and A-series advanced process technologies, Taiwanese media cited industry reports that advanced chip manufacturing nodes such as A10 and A14 have made solid progress.

In the naming of chip manufacturing processes, nanometers or "nm" refers to the size of transistors. Also called feature width, the smaller the value, the better for overall processing power and energy efficiency.

However, manufacturers such as TSMC and Intel are seeing fewer and fewer gains over time as it becomes increasingly difficult to shrink transistor sizes further. Therefore, they are adopting new names for their range of process technologies. Intel's 3nm later processes are called 20A and 18A, and a slide shared by TSMC management in December revealed that its 2nm later node will be called A14.

Industry insiders on the island speculate that TSMC is still completing trial production of 2nm products as planned to prepare for the implementation of a new 2nm manufacturing plant in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. Management said in the statement that 2-nanometer products will be launched to customers in 2025 and enter mass production in 2026.

The surge in talk about artificial intelligence products comes as the full blow of the semiconductor industry downturn continues, with chipmakers such as NVIDIA, AMD and Intel struggling to maintain healthy revenue statements. For example, NVIDIA's revenue for the quarter ending in October 2022 fell by 17% year-on-year, and its net profit fell by 72%. Similarly, TSMC will see annual declines in monthly revenue in eight of the 11 months in 2023. If not for a turning point in October, the company's financial performance would have been negative for eight consecutive months.