Should You Buy TSM While It's Under $400?
Key Points
TSMC’s accelerating AI demand has improved long-term visibility for its foundry business.
The company is expanding its CoWoS packaging capacity.
TSMC can continue to witness even more share price gains in 2026.
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's (NYSE: TSM) shares are already up by over 40% in 2025, but several Wall Street analysts believe that the rally may not be over. The most bullish among them is Susquehanna analyst Mehdi Hosseini, who increased TSMC's price target from $300 to $400 ahead of its third-quarter earnings results. Hosseini highlighted the critical role of TSMC's advanced process nodes and unmatched manufacturing scale in enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) compute.
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Here's why a $400 price target seems plausible in 2026.
Strong AI demand trends
TSMC is experiencing accelerated demand for AI-optimized chips, with rising requests for foundry capacity not only from customers but also from customers' customers to support their businesses. TSMC expects AI accelerator demand to grow at a mid-40%s compound annual growth rate through 2029 and believes actual demand could even exceed this forecast.
With token usage (a metric of AI computational power) across AI models increasing at an exponential rate, the need for high-performance, energy-efficient chips has surged. That trend has benefited TSMC, as advanced nodes (7-nanometer and below) accounted for 74% of its wafer revenues in the third quarter.
This demand is already translating into robust top-line and bottom-line growth. In the third quarter, TSMC's revenues soared 41% year over year to $33.1 billion, while earnings per share surged 50% to $2.91.
Future catalysts
TSMC is also focused on expanding its chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging capacity, which is used to integrate logic and high-bandwidth memory on AI accelerators. In fact, according to industry estimates, TSMC will exit calendar year 2026 with CoWoS capacity of 120,000 to 130,000 wafers per month, a dramatic improvement from the current CoWoS capacity of 75,000 to 80,000 wafers per month.
TSMC expects volume production of its N2P (extension of 2-nanometer family) and A16 technologies to commence in 2026, which could trigger another multiyear upgrade cycle in data centers, smartphones, and AI accelerators.
Considering all of these factors, TSMC seems well positioned to see meaningful share price growth in the coming year.
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Manali Pradhan, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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