Steven Cohen is a billionaire hedge fund investor who serves as CEO of Point72 Asset Management. While parsing through Point72’s most recent quarterly 13F filing, I came away with one pretty clear conclusion: Cohen is bullish on artificial intelligence (AI). In the September-ended quarter, some of Point72’s more outsized purchases were in “Magnificent Seven” stocks including Nvidia, Alphabet, and Microsoft.
Indeed, I see a lot of merit in owning big tech stocks as the AI narrative continues unfolding. But smart investors like Cohen know that there are plenty of other opportunities hiding in plain sight. Another recent purchase that really stuck out to me was Point72’s investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM). During the third quarter, Cohen’s fund scooped up roughly 588,000 shares — increasing his stake by 95%.
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Below, I’m going to outline why I see TSMC (as it’s commonly known) as a once-in-a-decade opportunity for AI investors and break down if now is a good time to follow Cohen’s lead.
Semiconductor companies such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and many others specialize in designing advanced chip ware that powers myriad generative AI applications and hardware devices all around the world. What many people don’t quite realize, however, is that these companies outsource much of their manufacturing efforts.
This is where TSMC enters the picture. Its foundry process is used heavily by many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies. Don’t believe me? Consider the fact that it manufactures equipment for Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm, Sony, and many more. The next decade looks incredibly bright for TSMC.
It’s not enough to say that TSMC’s future is bright because the AI market is enormous. Such a position is too vague and is rooted in surface-level assumptions. Instead, I’m going to break down two particular market opportunities that TSMC is positioned to dominate over the next decade:
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Global semiconductor foundry market: According to Market.us, the global total addressable market for semiconductor foundries is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 8.5% between 2024 and 2033 — ultimately reaching a size of $276 billion by early next decade. Right now, TSMC is estimated to own 62% of the global foundry market — with the next closest competitor, Samsung, reaching 13% of the market. With such an enormous lead and a host of tailwinds that I’ll address below, I think TSMC is well-positioned to continue acquiring incremental market share as the need for foundry services continues to rise.
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Global GPU market: My fellow Fool.com contributor Keithen Drury recently made a great point in that use cases for graphics processing units (GPUs) don’t really matter for a company such as TSMC. At the end of the day, so long as chip designers are innovating and coming out with next generation GPUs, there’s a really good chance that TSMC is involved in the manufacturing process. As I outlined in a prior piece, the global GPU market size is expected to eclipse $1.4 trillion by 2034.
