According to United Daily News (UDN) and Central News Agency (CNA), a severe DRAM shortage has left roughly $1 billion worth of TSMC-made Apple processors — including the 2nm A20 Pro destined for the iPhone 18 Pro — unable to complete packaging. Analyst Liu Pei-chen says TSMC (台積電) cannot intervene in DRAM supply directly but can reallocate production lines.
How is the DRAM shortage concretely disrupting TSMC's chip production flow?
According to reports carried simultaneously by United Daily News (UDN), Central News Agency (CNA), and TechNews, the market is reporting a severe DRAM shortage that has left processors TSMC (台積電) manufactures for Apple — valued at approximately $1 billion — unable to complete packaging. The chips are described as "stacking up" inside TSMC's facilities while waiting for memory to arrive.
All three outlets identify the specific product at the center of the bottleneck: the iPhone 18 Pro series is reported to feature, for the first time, an A20 Pro chip built on TSMC's 2-nanometer process. Wafer fabrication itself is proceeding smoothly, per the reports — the constraint sits downstream, at packaging, because DRAM supply needed for that packaging step is tight.
Liu Pei-chen (劉佩真), Director of the Industrial Economics Database at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台經院產經資料庫總監), explained the mechanism to UDN, CNA, and TechNews: today's high-end processors depend heavily on chip-level advanced packaging, which requires bonding a logic die together with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) or DRAM before the chip can ship. When memory runs critically short, a wafer fab can still produce high-end processors on schedule, but those processors cannot finish final packaging and testing without their memory counterpart — leaving a larger volume of high-value chips stranded in warehouse storage.
What ripple effects could this have on TSMC's revenue and operations?
Liu Pei-chen, cited identically across UDN, CNA, and TechNews, frames TSMC's revenue base as still resting on strong demand for high-performance computing and flagship chips — but says that foundation cannot fully insulate the company from the DRAM shortage's knock-on effects. She specifically flags that delivery pacing for advanced process nodes and advanced packaging could be affected.
The same three reports quote her warning of a second-order effect: flagship smartphone models' stocking timelines could be delayed as a result, which would in turn disrupt what has otherwise been a smooth production-to-delivery cycle and affect capital turnover efficiency for companies in the chain.
What strategies can — or might — TSMC deploy in response?
UDN, CNA, and TechNews all report the same assessment from Liu Pei-chen on TSMC's limited but real levers. As the world's leading foundry, TSMC (台積電) has no direct control over DRAM production or scheduling — it cannot manufacture the memory itself or dictate how much of it reaches the market. Facing shifting customer orders and capacity demands caused by the memory shortage, Liu says TSMC's response instead comes through flexible, dynamic reallocation of its own production lines and close coordination across its supply-chain ecosystem.
Liu further tells the three outlets that TSMC could moderately shift part of its capacity toward AI and high-performance-computing (HPC) chips — segments she describes as less exposed to the memory shortage — as a way to offset the volatility created by consumer-electronics component stocking problems.
Key figures at a glance
| Detail | Value | Reported by |
|---|
| Value of stalled, unpackaged processors | ~$1 billion | UDN, CNA, TechNews |
| Chip design affected | A20 Pro | UDN, CNA, TechNews |
| Process node | 2 nanometers (2nm) | UDN, CNA, TechNews |
| Target device | iPhone 18 Pro series | UDN, CNA, TechNews |
| Report date | August 7, 2026 | UDN, CNA, TechNews |
What this means
The three reports, sourced identically to Liu Pei-chen, describe a chain that starts upstream and ends downstream: wafer fabrication for the 2nm A20 Pro is proceeding without issue, yet roughly $1 billion in finished dies cannot reach Apple because the DRAM needed to complete chip-level packaging is in short supply. Liu's own framing captures the tension directly — TSMC's HPC and flagship-chip revenue base is strong on paper, but she says that strength cannot fully offset a bottleneck that sits outside TSMC's control, since the company cannot intervene in DRAM production or scheduling. Her two proposed responses — dynamic production-line reallocation and shifting some capacity toward AI/HPC chips less exposed to the memory shortage — are offered as mitigations available within TSMC's own operations, not as fixes to the underlying DRAM supply constraint itself.