TSMC explicitly claims there is stock piling.
After being blamed for the shortage of chips, TSMC did their own research and found evidences. TSMC plans to low prioritize orders from those companies who do.
And that it's $100B investment in increased capacity is 'not going to be enough.'
www.pcgamer.com
Who is stock piling?
Not limited companies in China. They certainly are more afraid of chip shortage due to Sino-American trade conflict. Others might want to benefit from shortage.
Anyway, many new foundries are being built around the world since last year. We shall see improvement of supply later next year.
If the shortages were a function of stockpiling why are chip makers announcing new foundries, with big announcements from Intel and TSMC? Besides, those foundries announced last year are not scheduled to come on-line until 2024 which may be optimistic. Fabs are like auto plants--from drawing board to initial production is a multi-year process. More fabs is just a reaction to increasing chipification, to coin a word, of all things.
I view Mr. Liu's stockpiling claims with some skepticism.
One man's stockpiling is another man's inventory rebuild from dangerously low levels or a buildup in inventory in anticipation of growing sales. In the automotive sector, chip orders were cancelled with plummeting sales and plant closures in the midst of the pandemic. Now they are caught short. On the other hand, global PC sales have been hitting 10 year highs and phones are on pace for a annual sales record. Are those non-automotive segments "stockpiling" more than usual based on strong sales while heading into the Christmas selling season? That's not really stockpiling, it's just staying ahead of the curve.
Liu is deflecting criticism over his production mix, unfair perhaps, in under-allocating to a lower margin segment (automotive) to satisfy demand in higher margin segments (phones and personal computing devices) in circumstances not of his making. If he went hog wild in ramping up automotive he'd be making less money and getting heat from the phone/computing side of the equation. Crudely put, the chips that go into cars are Model T's compared to the CPU Ferraris going into phones and PCs, with corresponding margins. Can you blame him? Not really.
While it may be hard to find the car you want at a rational price, PC's and phones have been well supplied, at least until Apple's announcement this week, lowering production estimates by 10 million units on chip shortages. TSMC is in the unfortunate position of being the big dog contract manufacturer serving all masters. If Liu wasn't getting heat from the automotive sector he'd be getting it from somewhere else. If TSMC is running at 100% capacity as Liu claims, other chip manufacturers who were or are struggling with getting up to capacity or are also skewing production away from automotive are happy to be in the shadows I'm sure.
You see the heat directed at TSMC from the automotive sector in this January 2021 piece:
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) is "expediting" auto-related products through its wafer fabs and reallocating wafer capacity, the company said on Thursday, amid a global shortage of auto chips.
www.reuters.com
In 2020, TSMC's production was 3% automotive, 48% phones, 33% non-phone high performance chips and, evidently, 16% "other". In response to heat on the automotive front, TSMC increased automotive 27% in the 4th. quarter of 2020 but that still represented only 3% of their production mix.
The link you provided is part 2 of the same story.
One thing is for sure. There is no little hording in the automotive sector. While dealers may make up some or all of the difference by jacking up new car prices while dealing with sharply declining inventories and sales, that's not the manufacturers. They make money getting cars to dealers. It's a matter of rebuilding chip inventories. The hording at the margins would be for rolling out high margin/high demand 2022 models and trims which wouldn't really qualify as hording in fact.