Meanwhile, Intel will see sales fall two per cent to $17.98 billion in the same period

Yahoo Finance said the potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC.

Intel has traditionally manufactured the chips it designs as part of its integrated device manufacturing model but the company is now increasingly reliant on TSMC and other foundries for certain components, while expanding its own manufacturing capacity in the West.

Chipzilla plans to use this increased capacity to produce more of its own chips while also supporting its revitalised foundry business, which hopes to take business from TSMC and South Korea's Samsung, the industry's other leading-edge chipmaker, in the future. Intel calls this cunning plan IDM 2.0, and it means it has to have two conflicting objectives:

It has to take foundry market share away from TSMC and Samsung by convincing various fabless chip designers to use its plants while using leading-edge nodes from TSMC and Samsung for certain components to compete with fabless companies like AMD and Nvidia.

Samsung has already surpassed Intel as the largest semiconductor company by revenue, so TSMC potentially growing larger than the x86 giant further underscores Intel’s problems.