Or they realize that at any point they have low-N years before Samsung, GloFo, etc. could catch up with investments from AMD, Nvidia, Apple, etc. so it behooves them not to gouge to the point that those investments make financial sense for those companies. TSMC might just be a couple billion dollar investments away from becoming a commodity again.
I wouldn't count on GloFo being a leader in process tech. August of 2018 they announced they suspended work on their 7nm, 5nm and 3nm processes. It looks like they're focusing more on being a follower. This has also forced AMD to compete with Apple and others for the best 7nm that TSMC can offer. Intel is lucky that AMD can't meet demand.
GloFo is sinking because TSMC aggressively courted AMD. In an alternate universe where TSMC was content to sit back and extract margin, GloFo would still be in the running.
Even if TSMC decided tomorrow to sit back and extract margin, GloFo could still probably get back in the game. That ability decays with time, of course, and that decay is what TSMC buys with their low margins. They are suffocating their competition to build a moat. It's a much better strategy than "extract margin and make big bets on fancy new tech to stay one node ahead," with Intel as Exhibit A.
GloFo has historically been unprofitable and their investors were unhappy with the idea that, just as they had finally reached profitability, they now needed to either
A) spend tens of billions of dollars on a new fab facility
B) shut down production in one of the existing facilities while spending billions of dollars to upgrade it to 7nm
While not having the volume to be able to court the largest customers who are the most interested in 7nm.
They decided to stick with their existing 14nm infrastructure and specialize in the long tail of smaller customers who want custom chips and don't need a leading-edge node.
The slowing of Moore's law means that they have the option to wait and see, bank up capital, and then jump back in when everyone else has done the hard work for them of figuring out EUV.
