TSMC

Morris Chang founded TSMC in 1987 at age 55, after being passed over for the top job at Texas Instruments. His idea was radical: a semiconductor company that only manufactured chips designed by other companies, never competing with its own customers. Every chip company at the time designed and manufactured its own products. Chang's "pure-play foundry" model was considered bizarre. It became the foundation of the entire modern technology industry.

TSMC's model enabled an entirely new category of company: the "fabless" semiconductor firm — companies that design chips but own no factories. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, and eventually hundreds of other companies became fabless, outsourcing all manufacturing to TSMC. Without TSMC's foundry model, none of these companies could have existed in their current form. The chip inside your iPhone was designed by Apple in California and manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 focused global attention on Taiwan's security in an entirely new way. Analysts calculated what a Chinese military action against Taiwan would mean for the global chip supply. The answer was stark: a disruption to TSMC's operations would halt production of smartphones, cars, medical devices, and military equipment worldwide within months. TSMC had become what analysts called "the silicon shield" — simultaneously Taiwan's most valuable strategic asset and the world's most critical piece of industrial infrastructure.

TSMC reported $122.4 billion in total revenue for 2025 — up 36% year-over-year — driven by AI chip demand. High-performance computing, which includes AI, accounted for 58% of revenue, up from 51% in 2024. North America contributed 75% of revenue. TSMC's first Arizona fabrication plant — Fab 21 Phase 1 — entered volume production in late 2024 and earned $514 million in profit during its first full year of operation. TSMC announced plans to invest $165 billion total in Arizona across six fabs, including advanced packaging facilities. The company that had been described as impossible to replicate outside Taiwan was proving its critics partially wrong.

TSMC began volume production of its 2nm (N2) process technology — the most advanced semiconductor node ever manufactured — in late 2025, using gate-all-around nanosheet transistors for the first time. The 2nm node delivers 10-15% speed improvements or 25-30% power reductions versus 3nm. Simultaneously, TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging — the technology that connects AI accelerator chips to high-bandwidth memory — became the single most constrained resource in the global AI supply chain. TSMC was scaling CoWoS capacity from 65,000 wafers per month in 2025 to a target of 120,000-130,000 per month in 2026. NVIDIA held the largest allocation. Without TSMC's packaging capacity, the AI boom could not proceed.