How Nvidia, Google and the rest of Big Tech may have made employees of world's biggest chipmaker very happy this year

Employees of the world's biggest chipmaker have a reason to smile, and they can thank the AI boom for it. TSMC chief executive C.C. Wei told staff that their profit-sharing payouts will climb more than 30% on average this year, Bloomberg reported. He shared the news at a town hall on Wednesday, telling Taiwan-based workers the jump would beat last year's increase—a notable promise, given the bonus pool already grew nearly 47% in 2025.

The logic is simple. The companies driving the AI gold rush—Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta—all lean on TSMC to manufacture their chips. That demand has pushed the Taiwanese firm's profits to record highs, with quarterly earnings more than doubling over two years. Now some of that money is flowing back to the people who actually make the silicon.

Why the bonus bump is tied to the AI spending spree

TSMC posted NT$572.5 billion ($18.2 billion) in earnings for the March quarter, more than double what it brought in over the same period two years ago. Its gross margin sits at an enviable 66% this year, per Bloomberg.

The pull from Big Tech explains a lot. Nvidia, whose chips power most large AI projects, just reported a quarterly profit of $58.3 billion, up 211% from a year earlier. Google and its hyperscaler peers plan to spend roughly $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year. Nearly all those data centres run on chips that TSMC builds.

That windfall shows up in the payout. TSMC set aside about NT$103 billion for profit-sharing in 2025, a 46.6% jump from the year before. The company's own rules promise no less than 1% of annual profit for the program. With AI infrastructure spending projected to hit $3 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030, the pipeline of work powering those bonuses isn't slowing down.

How worker frustration shaped the timing of Wei's pledge

Wei's promise didn't appear out of nowhere. For days, anonymous posts on Taiwanese forums questioned why bonus increases weren't keeping pace with soaring profits. Some workers even floated forming a union or staging a strike, a rarity at a company that has operated without one since 1987.

TSMC, which has no union, watched the grievances pile up online before Wei stepped in to address them directly. The company confirmed the town hall took place but declined to say more, Bloomberg noted. In an earlier statement, it said it was highly confident full-year profit-sharing growth would top last year's.

Wei, who has led TSMC for over a decade, tends to prefer stability over flashy gestures. This time, the numbers did the talking. The same AI frenzy that minted record profits has, for now at least, trickled down to the factory floor—and given workers something to cheer about.