Apple and Qualcomm have each offered more than a $1 billion to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) to obtain a dedicated supply of processor chips, and both their offers have been rejected, according to a Bloomberg report. Apple uses TSMC's chips for its iPhones and iPads, while Qualcomm is the leading supplier of application processors to the rival Android platform of mobile equipment.

Apple has been reported to be working with TSMC to bring up a 28-nm A6 processor. Meanwhile Qualcomm, which has designed the Snapdragon processor, is known to be suffering from a shortage of supply at the 28-nm node.

In July Morris Chang, chairman and CEO of TSMC, said the company was considering operating single-customer wafer fabs.

However, as a foundry supplier TSMC profits from serving many fabless chip companies, including Broadcom, Nvidia, MediaTek and many others.