If you want to know why graphics cards are still so painfully pricey, you might want to take a look at TSMC's record-high profits which are heading for $50 billion this year

(Image credit: An Rong Xu/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Nick found some pretty nice post-Prime Day prices on GPUs earlier today. But only relatively speaking. You're still looking at over $700 for a '70 Ti-class Nvidia card. Ouch. And one of the reasons why is surely the dominance of TSMC when it comes to manufacturing chips for the likes of Nvidia, AMD and, latterly, Intel. Which is why the company's latest record profits announcement matters.

TSMC has just reported its figures for the second quarter of 2025, and the result is a whopping $13.53 billion in profit. Yes, profit. TSMC's revenues for the period were over $31 billion. Those are some margins.

Close-up shot of an RTX 5070's PCIe slot — Now you know why an RTX 5070 costs so much... (Image credit: Future)

Investment bank Morgan Stanley publishes estimates of TSMC's wafer prices, which 3DCenter collates here. Wafers, of course, are the shiny discs onto which computer chips are etched using impossibly complex lithography machines.

Morgan Stanley reckons TSMC's current N3 wafers cost about $25,000 a pop. That compares with $15,000 for an N5 wafer cost in 2023 and 2024, which is essentially the technology Nvidia and AMD use for their current GPUs.

The cost of N5 is said to have increased a bit this year to about $20,000. But here's the really scary bit. Morgan Stanley thinks the going price for TSMC's N2 node, which is just coming online now and is expected to debut in Apple's next iPhone in September, is around $30,000.

Now, you might expect AMD and Nvidia to not leapfrog N3 for their next chips and go straight to that uber-pricey N2 node. But N3 is still more expensive than N5.

Of course, N3 is more dense than N5, so you'll still probably get more transistors per dollar going for the new node. But then you'd hope that the next RTX '70 series GPU, let's call it the RTX 6070, will have quite a few more transistors than the current RTX 5070.

Anyway, wafer prices going up is hardly a good thing for actual graphics card prices. And TSMC making bumper profits alongside Nvidia isn't all that encouraging, either. Oh well!

Best graphics card 2025

👉Check out our full guide👈

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

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Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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