No, there’s still competition. Samsung and Intel are trying, but are just significantly behind. So leading the competition by this wide of a margin means that you can charge more, and customers decide whether they want to pay way more money for a better product now, whether they’re going to wait for the price to drop, or whether they’ll stick with an older, cheaper node.
And a lot of that will depend on the degree to which their customers can pass on increased costs to their own customers. During this current AI bubble, maybe some of those can. Will those manufacturing desktop CPUs or mobile SoCs be as willing to spend? Maybe not as much.
Or, if the AI hype machine crashes, so will the hardware demand, at which point TSMC might see reduced demand for their latest and greatest node.