This may come as a bit of a surprise, but Samsung will produce far more wafers of computing silicon in 2020 than its pure foundry rival TSMC, although it is widely known that TSMC manufactures nearly all of its products, 3.1 million wafers per month, compared to TSMC's 2.7 million wafers per month, Samsung actually accounts for nearly 15% of the world's wafer supply, or just over one in seven wafers. The Korean giant is presumably grateful for its vast memory empire.

Intel, a relative lightweight manufacturer, came in sixth in the world rankings with a monthly production of just 884,000 wafers. Phew. Small change. This is according to a report by IC Insights, as reported by DigiTimes. [TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), the company that has historically made almost every product designed by Apple and AMD, many Nvidia GPUs, and most recently Intel chips, is the contract foundry Still number one, Samsung is still playing catch-up when it comes to getting licenses to produce shiny new silicon for other companies.

The fact that Nvidia has switched the bulk of its consumer GPU manufacturing to Samsung probably explains a bit why Nvidia's green team has a slightly better record than AMD in getting new graphics cards into the hands of PC gamers

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However, things are still very tight on this front. And if more people, businesses, and Internet cafes decide that cryptocurrency mining is more profitable than, say, staying closed during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, actual retail supply will remain potentially crazy low for the rest of the year is expected to remain low.

However, while last year's demand was unprecedented, IC Insights also notes that wafer production by the top five companies was up 40% year over year.

More hardware is being manufactured, and there are just more of us chasing it.

After Samsung and TSMC top the wafer manufacturing leaderboard, the memory makers are all over the place, with Micron in third, SK Hynix in fourth, and Kioxia (formerly a bit Toshiba) in fifth. After all, everything needs memory.