Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is under acute capacity and supply-chain pressure as artificial-intelligence demand outruns fab expansion, equipment delivery and upstream materials. Senior Vice President and co-COO Cliff Hou said at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 on September 2 that TSMC’s equipment procurement demand rose from a December 2025 baseline of 1 to 1.25 times by the first quarter and to 1.9 times by July—a roughly 90% increase in under eight months. The company is building about 20 fabs at once, including 13 in Taiwan and five to six overseas, versus a historical pace of four to five projects, yet Hou said the buildout is still insufficient and is constrained by shortages of skilled construction workers. Unimicron Technology Chairman James Chien said at the same forum that substrate supply-demand imbalance is worsening as designs grow larger and more complex, with core ABF materials and TGV-related technologies heavily dependent on small and mid-sized Japanese suppliers; Unimicron has held more than 10 coordination meetings with customers and those suppliers over 18 months. Chien also argued advanced and mature nodes are complementary in the AI ecosystem, highlighting opportunities in high-density bonding, specialty memory, logic-based dies, silicon interposers with deep trench capacitors and silicon photonics. TSMC has raised 2026 capital spending to $60 billion-$64 billion, targets monthly 3-nanometer output of 180,000 wafers by end-2026, and faces ongoing limits from industrial facilities, power reserves, advanced packaging, power delivery and thermal management as AI forces tighter system-level supply-chain coordination.