Profitable.

Would be very profitable, if they had the income from their advanced processes without the R+D expense for those processes.

They produce the entirety of Apple's Ax chips and AMD's lineup, plus the latest Snapdragons. They are shipping many units per each Intel CPU shipping and offer things nobody else can offer. I imagine that makes them really profitable.

> Are they that profitable or state sponsored?

The world now ships ~1.2B Smartphone every year, most of them Fabbed on TSMC. That is Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Mediatek. These four along is likely 80%+ of the market. Along with Modem, WiFi and dozen of other smaller components. That is excluding BitCoin, ASIC, FPGA, Gaming GPU, GPGPU, Network Processors etc all these market have exploded in the past 10 years and requires leading edge Fab all coming from TSMC. ( Well at least most part of it ). The market is so much bigger than Intel's 200M+ PC market and Server Market in unit volume, TSMC has been able to benefit from it.

And once you spread the R&D over a much larger volume of products, your unit cost economics drops. Hence benefiting everyone in the industry.