Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM) have both doubled over the past 12 months. AMD dazzled investors with robust sales of its CPUs and GPUs. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, benefited from soaring orders for new chips.
Both companies profited from Intel‘s (NASDAQ: INTC) misfortunes. Intel’s chip shortage, which was caused by a difficult jump from 14nm to 10nm chips, caused PC makers to buy more AMD chips.
Intel’s own foundry also fell behind TSMC in the “process race” to create smaller and more power-efficient chips. That failure allowed AMD, which outsources its chip production to TSMC, to produce more advanced chips.
