Bitmain would be requesting TSMC to go from 10.000 wafers a month for its Bitcoin ASICs, to 20.000 wafers a month, thus ranking as the largest buyer of the Taiwanese company.

Cryptocurrency mining is profitable not only for those who mine, but for companies that develop solutions and for companies that make silicon chips. The Chinese company Bitmain, who is in charge of developing and manufacturing ASICs for Bitcoin, which fly when they appear on the web. The company has gained a lot of weight in the market, so much so that this company buys about ten thousand wafers a month, but this figure is expected to double this month. According to an analyst at ARKinvest, this is more than NVIDIA is asking for.

ASICs are special machines, based on many processors, developed, in this case, to offer efficient mining of cryptocurrencies. The solutions developed by Bitmain, in one part remain within the company, while another part is sold to third parties. This company buys directly from TSMC, which produces some 10.000 wafers per month for the company and they would be agreeing to double this figure. We must bear in mind that a maximum of 5670 chips are obtained per wafer and with them up to 30 S9 miners can be developed. If we do the calculations, there are about 50 million chips to manufacture about 600.000 miners per month.

If this point is confirmed, hardware for mining will become a very important player. This also poses a risk to AMD and NVIDIA, who are currently a beneficiary part of the mining market, thanks to the cryptocurrencies that can be mined by GPUs. There is not much more data regarding this transition process, but it could be beneficial for both companies in part, because their graphs would see demand reduced and the prices of their components would fall. It would benefit the consumer, but not so much the brands, who have seen cryptocurrency mining, it has generated very important income.

TSMC - the world's largest chip factory - is all about crypto all of a sudden.
Bitmain is buying ~ 20k 16nm wafers a month. That's more than Nvidia. pic.twitter.com/ivZOqXvJXu

— James Wang (@jwangARK) January 19, 2018

Source: Hardware.info