TSMC Concepts

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton · 11 May 2023 · 401pp · 113,586 words

indispensability to this ecosystem that helps to explain Arm’s own. The most intricate chips in the world are manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), without whose supply both the US and China would struggle. Those intricacies are etched onto silicon using machines built by ASML, a Dutch company that

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products using 291 distinct technologies for 535 different buyers. Its largest customer was widely thought to be Apple, which accounted for roughly one-quarter of TSMC’s output for its iPhones, iPads and watches, but it also served a who’s who of the industry – Qualcomm, Nvidia, NXP, Advanced Micro

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redraw the world order. But shutting down Taiwan’s chip factories would cripple the world economy. In this tinderbox, both outcomes were possible. Most of TSMC’s fabrication plants – known as fabs – were directly in the line of fire. Clustered at Hsinchu Science Park, along Taiwan’s west coast facing

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, plus thousands of support engineers based at partner companies all over the world, who communicated with Taiwan-based staff remotely, often via augmented reality. TSMC’s Liu warned that an invasion would bring about the ‘destruction of the world’s rules-based order’ and render its factories as ‘non-operable

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capable of fulfilling the world’s requirements because a small handful have performed awesomely well – often over decades spent perfecting just one aspect. No wonder TSMC is in the political spotlight, but it is not alone. To make the most advanced chips, there is currently no alternative to the extreme

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Such was the capital intensity of the industry, by this time companies realised they could not do everything. Foundries such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) were beginning to offer alternative manufacturing options. The software used to design chips and the machinery needed to etch those designs onto silicon wafers were

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tech fields of microchips, optoelectronics, telecommunications and biotechnology. At the five factories owned by one of the park’s anchor tenants, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the floors rumbled and staff on the night shift were pitched into darkness. Thanks to a call placed with Taiwan’s premier, Vincent Siew, within

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the national tragedy carried on all over the island, with mounting criticism of the government’s emergency response. But little more than a week later TSMC’s operations were back running at 95 per cent capacity and visitors to Hsinchu – which also benefited from its own independent power supply – could

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find very little evidence of the recent disruption. The speed with which it was able to get back to work demonstrated TSMC’s great importance to Taiwan. That importance – as a national champion that created skilled jobs, drove exports and the economy at large – was matched

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process along overhead conveyor belts, came millions of chips to be shipped around the world and installed in mobile phones, games consoles and laptop computers. TSMC was the first company of its kind, which had contributed to its success, but it was not on its own. Another Taiwanese company, United

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Microelectronics Corp (UMC), had just sold off its design activities to focus on foundry services and was a close second in size to TSMC. It too was based at Hsinchu, offering another reason for the cluster’s political priority on the power grid from which it consumed 500MW per

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one-tenth of the surface area of California and counted 22 million inhabitants, but its ruthless efficiency meant there was rapidly becoming little alternative to TSMC. Less than three months after the quake, the company showed it had not lost momentum. At Hsinchu it held a ground-breaking ceremony for

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that leading the way with investment were the foundries, not the chipmakers who had traditionally built new plants to give them a competitive advantage. TSMC and peers such as UMC were pushing at the edge of what was possible and, presented with predictions for 30 per cent industry growth in

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our leadership position, increasing barriers to competition, and providing the best dedicated foundry services for our customers worldwide’.3 The new facility would add to TSMC’s existing estate. It already operated five 200mm fabs and two 150mm fabs. Adding another was not cheap – and nor was payback quick. The

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of Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing, Taiwan’s third-largest foundry company, and took control of a joint venture with the electronics firm Acer. Taken together, now TSMC’s output was expected to be almost double what it had achieved in 1999 and skittish customers were persuaded the firm was investing sufficiently in

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Industrial Park (TSIP) with hopes of closing the north-south economic divide. Marking the occasion with the spectacle of a traditional Chinese dragon dance, TSMC’s was the first foundry on site. In case of earthquakes, foundational steel rods had been sunk deep into the bedrock and dampers incorporated to

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time to reduce that to 100nm – one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper.4 To outsiders, the numbers were mind-blowing, but TSMC was certain they added up. The risk associated with such massive capital investment could be spread across a broad range of global customers. What helped

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up and had never had to build their own plants precisely because foundries supplied capacity. One other, lesser-known, decision from that time was that TSMC declined the offer to license the 0.13-micron – 130nm – processing technology from the US chip giant IBM. With long-term growth in mind,

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it preferred to develop its own. Rather than replicating other firms’ best practices as it had been required to do in the early days, TSMC was inventing its own methods to churn out the most detailed, most powerful chips, reliably and cost-effectively. This latest round of investment would extend

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consumption. Now that workshop included microchips, which had started out as an emblem of US innovation 40 years ago. But the further operators such as TSMC pulled ahead, the more the US and China were pulled into Taiwan’s orbit. Tensions would follow. The World Tilts Within a couple of

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also ascribed to T.J. Rodgers, another outspoken industry leader and boss of Cypress Semiconductor, a firm based in San Jose, California. At first TSMC survived on crumbs from the biggest chipmakers, including Intel, Motorola and TI, who would gladly pass on the manufacture of their oldest technologies that still

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. They were not disappointed: ‘… everybody expected … this new company to be a weak competitor,’ Chang said years later. ‘Well, they found this new company, TSMC, to be a strong supplier.’30 From the early 1990s, the fabless start-ups designing specialist chips began to bring in business. They were keen

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manufacturer that was not in competition with them. For these newcomers, including California-based Nvidia, established in 1993 among a crop of specialist graphics chipmakers, TSMC’s arrival was transformational. The opportunity to invest faster in R&D accelerated years of progress for the industry – and ultimately for the end-user

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20-year focus on building its global position, that shattered the structure of the microchip industry, as did Chang’s offer to work with anyone. TSMC was an enabler, not a competitor, unleashing new chipmaking talent and reviving long-established firms by handling production for them. It did not seek

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well-known cavalier approach to intellectual property that made foreign investors tread carefully. When China set out its stall in chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was riding high. In 2014, it commanded 54 per cent of the foundry segment for global semiconductors, with 42 per cent of revenues originating from

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lured from the US to Taiwan almost two decades before, was now the elder statesman of industry, regularly representing Taiwan on the global stage. TSMC had built the vast economies of scale required for a capital-intensive industry and a standard process technology that it constantly sought to improve. It

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Apple relationship kicked off over dinner, when Chang hosted the company chief operating officer Jeff Williams for a simple home-cooked meal. Apple first contracted TSMC to make all the application processor chips for its iPhone 4 devices in 2010. Chang reportedly committed $9bn and a 6,000-strong workforce

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at its Tainan site to show that he took the opportunity very seriously.19 Not everything it did had worked, though. TSMC’s own effort to develop its own DRAM memory chips without relying on foreign technology was long forgotten. But the memory market’s cyclicality,

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often caused by factory over-capacity, made margins extremely volatile compared to the more stable non-memory segment where it excelled. TSMC had kept at bay Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), one of China’s notable early industry successes. Founded in 2000 by Richard Chang, a Taiwanese

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designed to make US customers take fright. Allegations of furtive photocopying and email exchanges led to an eventual settlement where SMIC would pay $175m to TSMC over six years. But a second lawsuit was filed when SMIC reportedly did not hand back stolen documents and carried on compiling more information. Eventually

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foreign-produced direct-product rule. That meant Huawei could no longer buy from foreign companies if they used American technology in semiconductor manufacturing and prompted TSMC to curtail supply from September. Its Kirin chipset was dead – for now. The US did all it could to extend its influence beyond its

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partnership was drifting further apart. A year earlier, after Morris Chang and Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams had forged a relationship over dinner, TSMC was first called on to manufacture for Apple. Regardless, when Apple and Samsung finally settled their differences out of court in 2018, after a jury

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for graphics chips was slow to take off, but two things changed. Struggling to secure production capacity with European chipmaker SGS-Thomson, Huang wrote to TSMC founder Morris Chang after he couldn’t get a response from the company’s US sales office. A relationship was formalised in 1998. ‘They

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325 fee-paying members, including most of the top chip suppliers: Qualcomm, automotive specialist NXP Semiconductors and, from China, Alibaba and Huawei. Just as TSMC, the foundry pioneer, had succeeded in lowering barriers to entry by removing the need to build a foundry, RISC-V was a magnet for chip

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2021, on the day the mighty Intel announced it was changing direction to manufacture other designers’ chips by adopting the ‘foundry’ model popularised by TSMC, SiFive said it would work with it to make RISC-V designs more widely available. One year later, soon after Arm’s sale to Nvidia

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chandeliers.1 They had gathered to mark a significant milestone: the 90th birthday of Morris Chang. The white-haired founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Taiwan’s largest and most important company, was actually born in July, but the Covid-19 outbreak prevented celebrations until this moment. Chang had retired

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circuit design, electronic design automation, telecommunications, and electric vehicle manufacturing, the local news outlet UDN said.5 Further raids took place in May. Taiwan and TSMC stood strong despite a backdrop of increasing political tensions. Given President Trump’s combative approach to international affairs, it was hard to imagine that US

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Graduate Professional Military Education, Air University, proposed that Washington and Taipei should pursue a ‘broken nest’ strategy of deterrence by convincing China they would destroy TSMC’s facilities in the event of an invasion. ‘An automatic mechanism might be designed, which would be triggered once an invasion was confirmed,’ McKinney and

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the rapid evacuation and processing of the human capital that operates the physical semiconductor foundries’.7 If they remained in the country, industry executives doubted TSMC’s Taiwanese engineers would work under Chinese rule. And even if the plants were not bombed – by either side – there would be untold disruption

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engineers to develop its own semiconductor design software, a niche field dominated by two US providers, Cadence Design Systems and Synopsis.14 Blocked from using TSMC for manufacturing, Huawei’s biggest challenge was to create its own processor production line. It was not something it shied away from. Reports suggested it

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bright blue shirt, revealed that Intel would begin making chips to design specifications supplied by its customers as it adopted the ‘foundry’ model pioneered by TSMC 34 years earlier. ‘The digitisation of every industry is accelerating the global demand for semi-conductors at a torrid pace, but a key challenge

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over a decade.39 Before most of those announcements, from 2020 to 2030 global manufacturing capacity was predicted to increase by 56 per cent.40 TSMC’s Morris Chang was doubtful all of these political initiatives would have the desired effect, calling America’s attempt to grow domestic chip production

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poor start, reporting fourth-quarter operating profit at an eight-year low as the slowing global economy hammered demand for chips and its electronic goods. TSMC cut its capital expenditure. One thing was for sure: demand might weaken but the great expansion in supply meant the world would never run

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Arm has remained on the right side of useful and economical – an effective enabler and partner. To echo some of Morris Chang’s words about TSMC, market expectations of a weak competitor – if Arm generated any expectations at all on day one – eventually dissolved into the realisation that Arm could

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edges/case-studies-in-the-taiwan-miracle/hsinchu-science-park-a-case-study-in-taiwans-shift-to-tech/from-industry-to-innovation-hsinchu-science-park-tsmc-and-the-development-of-taiwans-tech-sector/opening-hsinchu-science-park 27 https://www.semi.org/en/Oral-History-Interview-Morris-Chang 28 https://

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https://riscv.org/risc-v-10th/ 15. GOING GLOBAL: SOME FURIOUS SOVEREIGN SPENDING 1 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4360807 2 https://investor.tsmc.com/static/annualReports/2021/english/index.html 3 https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/771343-2021-04/ 4 https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech

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/article/3130628/tsmc-founder-morris-chang-says-chinas-semiconductor-industry-still 5 https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/14/taiwan_china_tech_worker_raids/ 6 https://www.reuters

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content/uploads/2020/09/Government-Incentives-and-US-Competitiveness-in-Semiconductor-Manufacturing-Sep-2020.pdf 41 https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/20/us_chips_tsmc/ 42 https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1563/intel-reports-second-quarter-2022-financial-results 43 https://www.wsts.org/76/

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee · 13 May 2025 · 377pp · 138,306 words

out,” and take over. Where Taiwan remains strongest is in semiconductors. Every notable Apple product relies on chips sourced from a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, by far the world’s most advanced chipmaker and the crux of Taipei’s “Silicon Shield” against possible invasion by Beijing. Washington has reconciled itself

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’d sent a message back to Cupertino: “This stuff will kill our business here if we’re not careful.” CHAPTER 24 TWIN BETS—FOXCONN AND TSMC The global financial crisis had a profound impact on Beijing’s world view. Washington had for years been incentivizing China to be a member of

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was unimpeachable. It really only had one downside: The production of Apple’s two most important products was now even more firmly fastened in China. TSMC Another company made a fateful gamble on Apple around the same time: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or

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TSMC. Like other companies dealt a blow by the financial crisis, TSMC initially reacted by cutting staff. When workers protested, the famed founder and chairman of the company, Morris Chang, retook the reins. The seventy-seven

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Chang through his wife, Sophie Chang, a relative of Terry Gou. Dinner between them launched months of “intense” negotiations, according to Chang, as Williams pressed TSMC on prices and convinced the Taiwanese group to make a major investment. “The risk was very substantial,” Williams recalled at a gathering for

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TSMC’s thirtieth anniversary in 2017. “If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double-plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want

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the early partnership. One is that Chang wouldn’t commit to Apple’s demands. In a 2025 interview with the podcast Acquired, Chang said that TSMC would’ve had to raise substantial amounts of money, either by selling bonds or issuing more stock. Williams had another idea: “You can eliminate your

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, our stock to going to drop like hell,” he recounted. Chang agreed to take only half of Apple’s order. Even this partial commitment forced TSMC to borrow $7 billion, so it could invest $9 billion and devote 6,000 full-time employees working round the clock to bring up a

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in eleven months, according to Williams. “In the end, the execution was flawless,” he said. The partial commitment forced Apple to toggle between Samsung and TSMC, which some in Cupertino saw as a plus—it meant that Apple wasn’t beholden to just one supplier for what serves as the brain

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within the iPhone. But Srouji’s team found it nightmarish to manage both suppliers. So Apple turned to TSMC on an exclusive basis, establishing over-the-top contract terms to protect itself. A person familiar with the contract characterized it as saying: “We need

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’re gonna put us at risk of going out of business.” It was a “mutually assured destruction” type of situation, this person says, because if TSMC didn’t perform in any given year, there’d be no iPhone. So the Apple decision was made: “We are going to put all of

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our eggs in one basket, and then we’re gonna guard the basket.” TSMC’s bet would prove critical for making it the world leader in semiconductor fabrication, with Apple as its biggest client. From Cupertino’s perspective, it

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. “This isn’t just about Tim Cook’s legacy,” he says. “This is about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s legacy.” CHAPTER 41 A STAGGERING VULNERABILITY—TSMC Even as Apple has made some moves to diversify away from China, other aspects of the company’s strategy have intensified its vulnerabilities. In particular

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United States and Israel. But Cupertino abandoned the American chipmaker in favor of “Apple Silicon”—chips designed in-house and exclusively manufactured in Taiwan by TSMC. Apple had already pursued this strategy for portable products, namely iPhone and iPad, following its shift away from Samsung chips. At a pure business level

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the common aspiration of the people,” he told thousands of supporters. “No one can stop the march of history.” Any military action would immediately threaten TSMC, which is responsible for making at least 80 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. In war games involving an invasion of Taiwan by

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survive. “It would go out of business on day one of the war,” according to Chris Miller, author of Chip War. “The moment fighting starts, TSMC facilities would stop producing. It would never be reopened.” Such a cessation in production would have disastrous effects on the world economy. Avril Haines, US

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to more than $1 trillion, on an annual basis, for the first several years.” Indeed, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has credibly called TSMC “the only corporation… in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production.” For Apple alone, the impact would be

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to do that,” they add. “But at the same time, that mere possibility—I’m sure it keeps Tim Cook up at night.” Mark Liu, TSMC’s chairman at the time, tried to comfort investors in 2022 by minimizing the threat of a China invasion—explaining that unlike, say, oil fields

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, chip factories aren’t some prize to be won. “Nobody can control TSMC by force,” he told CNN. “If you [launch an] invasion, you will render TSMC factor[ies] non-operable.” In the event Liu is wrong, some US officials have speculated that the American military

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into Chinese hands,” former US national security advisor Robert O’Brien told Semafor in April 2023. But Taiwan’s political vulnerabilities may not even be TSMC’s biggest risk. The island nation is situated on what is known as “the world’s greatest earthquake belt,” where 81 percent of such tremors

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amounts to hundreds per year. A single large earthquake could disrupt production for days, weeks, or months, depending on the location and magnitude. Yet Apple, TSMC’s biggest client for more than a decade, relies on this location for the most important chips undergirding every one of its biggest products. “It

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be nervous as shit.” There are signs that Warren Buffett, Apple’s biggest single investor, is nervous. In early 2023 he sold his stake in TSMC, worth nearly $5 billion, citing geopolitical risks. Buffett called the Taiwanese chipmaker “one of the best managed and important companies in the world,” but added

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Apple from $178 billion to $69.9 billion, a reduction of nearly two-thirds. The moves went unexplained, but the logic behind his sale of TSMC stock is just as valid for Apple. These challenges are unlikely to dissipate with time. In the first Cold War, the United States could rely

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Samsung, the only company that sells more phones than Apple, is much less vulnerable. Samsung runs its own chip foundries, which are second only to TSMC, in Korea and Texas, and in 2023 the company pledged to invest $230 billion to build five new fabrication plants over the next two decades

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’s ability to import certain components, but the impact would be far less than for Apple. As Cupertino attempts to diversify to India for manufacturing, TSMC is in the process of diversifying chip fabrication to the United States, with direct aid from Washington. In May 2020

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, TSMC announced a major investment to build an advanced semiconductor fabrication facility, or fab, in Phoenix, Arizona, and by 2024 the plans had expanded to include

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customers and the seriousness of Washington’s efforts. The three fabs will be the “largest foreign direct investments in a greenfield project in US history,” TSMC says. However, amid reports of culture clashes and a shortage of American talent to fill 6,000 planned roles, the start of production was delayed

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by a year to early 2025. Even if TSMC does produce its cutting-edge chips for Apple at the site, some reporting suggests that the chips will first have to be shipped to Taiwan

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to shield silicon and enhance the electrical connectivity of the chip circuitry. As the chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research firm, has said: “The TSMC Arizona fab is effectively a paperweight in any geopolitical tension or war [with China over Taiwan] due to the fact that it still requires sending

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has ever devised, and Taiwan had reason to keep its best export capabilities at home. No less than Morris Chang, the now retired founder of TSMC, has cast serious doubt on the efforts: “It’s not going to be enough,” he said in 2022. “I think it will be a very

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expensive exercise in futility.” In addition, the reelection of Donald Trump could hamper or even implode TSMC’s efforts, given that Trump has accused Taiwan of stealing America’s semiconductor industry and has threatened to cancel the CHIPS and Science Act. The

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House sought to investigate how it was even possible. To be clear, the chips don’t match the bleeding-edge capabilities of those manufactured by TSMC, but they’ve demonstrated far more capability than most experts had predicted. Moreover, Huawei phones now run HarmonyOS, a novel operating system that, in early

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the world of semiconductors. An ODM is more like Nvidia and Qualcomm, whose prowess is in chip design, not manufacturing; an OEM is more like TSMC, which operates a foundry to produce, or “fabricate,” a chip. But the parallel is blurry because, unlike the clean distinction in the world of chips

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Shop,” Associated Press, May 9, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/09/apple-iphone-fight-chinese-shop. Chapter 24: Twin Bets—Foxconn and TSMC “you were our teacher”: Henry Paulson, “Oral History: Transcript,” Presidential Oral Histories: George W. Bush Presidency, Miller Center, March 11, 2013, https://millercenter.org/the

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a Tech Cold War,” New York Times, August 4, 2023. through his wife, Sophie Chang: Ibid. “The risk was very substantial”: TSMC 30th Anniversary Forum 2017--Hosted by Morris Chang. Chang wouldn’t commit: “TSMC Founder Morris Chang,” Acquired (podcast), Spring 2025, Episode 1, January 26, 2025, https://www.acquired.fm/episodes

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/tsmc-founder-morris-chang. Chapter 25: “The Navy SEALs” a lawsuit emerged over its use of the term iPad: “Apple ‘Settles China iPad Trademark Dispute for $

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/electronics/tata-seals-deal-with-pegatron-for-iphone-plant-in-indias-tamil-nadu-sources-say/articleshow/115380573.cms?from=mdr. Chapter 41: A Staggering Vulnerability—TSMC reiterated his desire to “reunify”: Nectar Gan, “Xi Vows ‘Reunification’ with Taiwan on Eve of Communist China’s 75th Birthday,” CNN, October 1, 2024, https

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in history”: Nicholas Kristof, “Visiting the Most Important Company in the World,” New York Times, January 24, 2024. “Nobody can control”: Kif Leswing, “Apple Chipmaker TSMC Warns Taiwan-China War Would Make Everybody Losers,” CNBC, August 2, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/apple-chipmaker

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-tsmc-warns-taiwan-china-war-would-make-everybody-losers.html. “never going to let”: Steve Clemons, “The U.S. Would Destroy Taiwan’s Chip Plants if

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’s greatest earthquake belt”: “Where Do Earthquakes Occur?” US Geological Survey, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-do-earthquakes-occur. sold his stake in TSMC: Michelle Toh, “Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Sells Entire Stake in TSMC,” CNN, May 16, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/investing/berkshire-hathaway-taiwan

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-tsmc-stock-exit-hnk-intl/index.html. slashed his stake in Apple: Eric Platt, “Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Halves Stake in Apple,” Financial Times, August

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Apple’s Plan to Make Chips in Arizona,” The Information, September 11, 2023, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-plan-to-make-chips-in-arizona-tsmc-nvidia-amd-tesla?rc=ropvb4. “It’s not going”: Chang’s comments, quoted in the Kristof column, were first made here: Morris Chang, Jude Blanchette

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, 111 Sculley, John, 20, 28–30, 36 Semafor, 374 semiconductors, 7, 11, 72, 112, 124, 133, 159, 221, 222, 345 Chinese production of, 355–56 TSMC, 11, 220–22, 372–76, 377 September 11 attacks, 136, 382 Sexton, Rory, 245–46, 248, 314, 316, 318 Sharp, 33 Shenzhen, 87–88, 91

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iPod manufacture in, 117–18, 122, 124, 137, 140–42 Red Supply Chain and, 327, 328, 330, 331 see also Foxconn Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), 11, 220–22, 372–76, 377 Tan, Tang, 137, 162 Target, 186 tariffs, 69, 141, 170, 280, 344, 347, 363–65, 380 Tata Group, 371

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trading companies, 240–41 Tropian, 155 Trump, Donald, 280, 343–45, 347, 358, 363, 376, 377, 380 Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, 310 TSMC, 11, 220–22, 372–76, 377 Tupman, David, 136–37, 155 Tuza, Denny, 248 Uber, 289, 290 United Airlines, 295, 350, 351 University of Michigan

Four Battlegrounds

by Paul Scharre · 18 Jan 2023

market more concentrated than in pure-play foundries specializing in chip fabrication. One single firm overwhelmingly dominates the contract foundry market: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC is the third-largest semiconductor company globally behind Intel and Samsung and alone accounts for over half of the global pure-play foundry market. Combined

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States, by contrast, has 10 percent of the foundry market.) Raw sales figures understate Taiwan’s significance, however. Not all semiconductors are created equal, and TSMC is not only the largest contract foundry but also a technology leader. The overarching trend in semiconductors, since the 1960s, has been toward smaller transistors

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-edge foundry can cost $10 billion to $20 billion. The massive capital expenditures required make it hard for other companies to compete with industry leaders. TSMC planned to spend between $40–44 billion in capital expenditures in 2022 alone. The skyrocketing cost of chip fabrication has consolidated the semiconductor market, driving

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nm, 22 nm, 10 nm, and 7 nm. In practice, node naming has long been divorced from actual transistor size.) Only two companies, Samsung and TSMC, are producing chips at the current leading-edge 5 nm process node. Taiwanese foundries churn out one-fifth of global chip fabrication (from both contract

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foundries and integrated device manufacturers), but over 90 percent of leading-edge chips at the 7 nm node and below. For AI chips, TSMC manufactured eight of the ten AI-specialized chips available at the 16 nm process or below as of 2020, including both leading GPUs (designed by

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Congress expanded its authorities in 2018. The U.S. government has more recently taken steps to increase chip manufacturing in the United States. In 2021, TSMC began construction of a $12 billion leading-edge 5 nm fab in Arizona and Samsung rolled out its plans for a $17 billion leading-edge

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semiconductor manufacturing technology. The manufacturing equipment used to make chips is a key control point in the global semiconductor industry. The equipment used by SMIC, TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and other chip producers has to come from somewhere, and chip fabrication equipment is highly specialized. The market for semiconductor manufacturing equipment is

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ban to include not only American-made chip components, but also American-made equipment used to produce chips for Huawei. This meant that companies like TSMC, which was fabricating chips in Taiwan, were prohibited from using any U.S. equipment for making chips for Huawei, even if the chips themselves were

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100 percent made outside of the USA. (Huawei owns their own chip design firm, HiSilicon, but relies on contract foundries like TSMC to manufacture the chips.) U.S. lawmakers were thrilled. Senator Ben Sasse said, “The United States needs to strangle Huawei. . . . This is pretty simple: chip

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Huawei, not just chips for Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon. U.S. industry protested the expansive ban (which also applied to them), but it was effective. TSMC stated they would no longer ship chips to Huawei as of mid-September. In the last quarter of 2020

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, TSMC sales to China dropped by over 70 percent. One industry insider told the Washington Post, “This kills Huawei.” Empowered by their successes against Huawei, U.

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, and mathematics TEVV test and evaluation, verification and validation TPU Tensor Processing Unit TRACE Target Recognition and Adaptation in Contested Environments TSA Transportation Security Administration TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company TTC Trade and Technology Council UAV unmanned aerial vehicle UK United Kingdom UN United Nations U.S. United States U.S

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fabless market: 2020 State of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, 8. 27over half of the global pure-play foundry market: Huang Tzu-ti, “Taiwan’s TSMC the World’s Top Chipmaker by Market Cap,” Taiwan News, July 16, 2020, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3968098; “China’s Largest Chipmaker

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/5-commandments. 28fab costs have increased: Khan and Mann, AI Chips. 28leading-edge foundry can cost $10 billion to $20 billion: Arjun Kharpal, “Apple Supplier TSMC to Build a $12 Billion Chip Factory in the U.S.,” CNBC, May 15, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15

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/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factory.html; Mark Lapedus and Ann Steffora Mutschler, “Regaining the Edge in U.S. Chip Manufacturing,” Semiconductor Engineering, October 26, 2020,

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Far-Reaching,” The Economist, January 21, 2021, https://www.economist.com/business/2021/01/23/chipmaking-is-being-redesigned-effects-will-be-far-reaching; AleksandarK, “TSMC Completes Its Latest 3 nm Factory, Mass Production in 2022,” TechPowerUp, November 27, 2020, https://www.techpowerup.com/275255

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/tsmc-completes-its-latest-3-nm-factory-mass-production-in-2022; “Samsung Considers Austin for $17 Billion Chip Plant, Seeks Tax Breaks of at Least $806

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, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/samsung-considers-austin-for-17-billion-chip-plant.html. 28$40–44 billion in capital expenditures: Yang Jie, “TSMC to Invest Up to $44 Billion in 2022 to Beef Up Chip Production,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles

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/tsmc-to-invest-up-to-44-billion-in-2022-to-beef-up-chip-production-11642076019. 28each evolution of chip production: Lapedus and Steffora Mutschler, “Regaining the

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.com/article/no-more-nanometers/; WikiChip, s.v. “Technology Node.” 28current leading-edge 5 nm process node: Ian Cutress, “‘Better Yield on 5nm Than 7nm’: TSMC Update on Defect Rates for N5,” Anandtech, August 25, 2020, https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-than-7nm

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-tsmc-update-on-defect-rates-for-n5; Jeet, “Samsung Begins Mass Production of 5nm Chipset; Also Developing 4nm Technology,” Gizmochina, July 30, 2020, https://www.gizmochina.

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Review Modernization Act of 2018,” treasury.gov, n.d., https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/206/Summary-of-FIRRMA.pdf. 179TSMC began construction: Stephen Nellis, “TSMC Says Has Begun Construction at Its Arizona Chip Factory Site,” Reuters, June 1, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology

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/tsmc-says-construction-has-started-arizona-chip-factory-2021-06-01/; Alan Patterson, “TSMC to Build 5nm Fab in Arizona,” EE Times, May 15, 2020, https://www.eetimes.com/tsmc-to-build-5nm-fab-in-arizona/. 179Samsung rolled out its plans: Anton

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$20 Billion in New Chip Factories in Ohio”; Stephen Nellis, “Phoenix Okays Development deal with TSMC for $12 Billion Chip Factory,” Reuters, November 18, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tsmc-arizona/phoenix-okays-development-deal-with-tsmc-for-12-billion-chip-factory-idUSKBN27Y30E; “Samsung Considers Austin for $17 Billion Chip Plant

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/amphtml/news/chinese-chipmaker-smic-buys-1-143115414.html. 181chip fabrication processes as advanced as the 7 nm node: TSMC’s original “N7” 7 nm process introduced in 2018 used deep ultraviolet lithography. TSMC’s improved “N7+” 7 nm process, which entered full-scale production in 2019, uses EUV lithography. WikiChip, s

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. “7 nm lithography process,” n.d., https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process; “7nm Technology,” Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, n.d., https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic/l_7nm. 182supply of photoresist: Samuel M. Goodman, Dan Kim, and John VerWey, “The South Korea-Japan Trade Dispute in

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-to-technology-chips-sources-say-idUSKCN25D1CC. 184TSMC sales to China dropped: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, 4Q20 Quarterly Management Report (draft), January 14, 2021, https://investor.tsmc.com/english/encrypt/files/encrypt_file/reports/2021-01/4Q20ManagementReport.pdf; “The Struggle Over Chips Enters a New Phase,” The Economist, January 21, 2021, https

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. 186100 miles off the coast of China: John Lee and Jan-Peter Kleinhans, “Would China Invade Taiwan for TSMC?” The Diplomat, December 15, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/would-china-invade-taiwan-for-tsmc/. 186the Chinese Communist Party has pledged to absorb: Yew Lun Tian and Yimou Lee, “China Drops Word

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, digital, 138–39 Syria, 58 system integration, 91 tactics and strategies, 270 Taiwan, 27, 71, 76, 100, 175, 178, 185–86 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), 27–28, 179, 181, 184 Taiwan Strait, 71, 75–76 talent, 30–34, 304 Tang Kun, 393 tanks, 192 Tanzania, 109 targeting cycle, 263 target

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, 71 and TikTok, 147 Twitter account, 150 trust, 249–53 Trusted News Initiative, 138–39 “truth,” 130 Tsinghua University, 31, 93, 173, 291 TSMC, See Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) TTC (Trade and Technology Council), 187 Turkey, 107, 108, 110 Turkish language, 234 Twitter, 139–40, 142, 144, 149, 247 Uganda, 108

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

by Edward Fishman · 25 Feb 2025 · 884pp · 221,861 words

the so-called “Asian tiger” economies of South Korea and Taiwan became export powerhouses. Corporate giants such as Sony, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) churned out the electronic components that powered the digital revolution. Most important of all, China emerged as the workshop of the world. The country’s

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-largest manufacturer of smartphones and trailing closely behind South Korea’s Samsung. Its chip design unit, HiSilicon, rose to become the second-largest customer of TSMC, the world’s leading chip foundry. By lavishing Huawei with subsidies and other unfair advantages, Beijing was not playing by the rules of the international

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equipment couldn’t function without American semiconductors and other microelectronics. As for Huawei’s in-house chip design unit, HiSilicon, it had outsourced production to TSMC, a Taiwanese company whose foundries ran on American software and machine tools. A senior telecom executive told the Financial Times that a ZTE-style denial

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objected to them, businesses all over the world fell into line. The practical implications of a new FDPR would be similar. The Taiwanese tech giant TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, counted Huawei as its second-biggest customer, right after Apple. Huawei accounted for upward of 15 percent of

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TSMC’s revenue. But TSMC also needed a variety of American software and machine tools to power its foundries. The new FDPR would present TSMC and other chip companies around the world with a choice: you can sell to

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a global heavyweight like Huawei. Another issue was that the FDPR would pose this choice not to financial institutions but to industrial juggernauts such as TSMC and Samsung. These powerful corporations were less habituated to complying with U.S. sanctions and held more political clout in their home countries than the

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the policy. Among the companies whose actions would determine the FDPR’s success or failure, none carried more weight than Taiwan-based TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry. TSMC’s close ties to both Huawei and American companies exemplified the dilemma that the FDPR posed to businesses around the world. Huawei

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was TSMC’s second-biggest customer, yet TSMC also relied on American technologies to run its foundries, and the company produced the processors that ran every Apple iPhone and the Nvidia

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chips that powered most advanced AI algorithms. Ultimately, TSMC decided that its U.S. connections mattered more. A few weeks after Commerce issued the

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FDPR, TSMC’s chairman announced that the company would not exploit the loopholes but rather cut ties with Huawei

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. TSMC also revealed plans to invest $12 billion in a new chip factory in Arizona, a deal brokered in

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would have “very, very serious” ramifications for Huawei’s role in Britain’s 5G network, according to UK government officials. For starters, the loss of TSMC and other suppliers would force Huawei to overhaul its list of components, which meant British intelligence could no longer plausibly claim to understand the inner

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platform, TikTok was thus protected. Next up on Washington’s hit list was Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC. Founded in 2000 by an ex-TSMC employee named Richard Chang, SMIC was supposed to be China’s answer to the world-class Taiwanese chip foundry. It had never quite caught up

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from semiconductors and other high-tech gear from both American firms and companies abroad that used U.S. equipment or software. Shortly after this announcement, TSMC and other big chipmakers all over the world terminated sales to Russia, just as they had done to Huawei two years earlier. Other G7 states

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than $50 billion in America’s own chip industry. (As things stood, over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips were made by TSMC in Taiwan, a dependence that would prove disastrous if China invaded the island.) Finally, on October 7, the Commerce Department announced the three new FDPRs

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of Western equipment and spare parts they had hoarded before the latest export controls kicked in. The manufacturing process was much slower and costlier than TSMC’s for making comparable chips; it wasn’t even clear it could be done profitably. But that didn’t matter for the Chinese government, which

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any losses. Nevertheless, for all their efforts and impressive product launches, Chinese firms remain at least five years behind cutting-edge chip manufacturers such as TSMC, and even further behind equipment makers such as Applied Materials, ASML, and Tokyo Electron. Huawei and SMIC still rely heavily on Western technology, and they

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, 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/01/huawei-beats-apple-smartphone-manufacturer-samsung-iphone. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT second-largest customer of TSMC: Miller, Chip War, 275. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT rules of the international trading system: “The International Trading System and Trade Negotiations,” United Nations

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.georgetown.edu/publication/the-semiconductor-supply-chain. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Huawei as its second-biggest customer: Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li, “TSMC Halts New Huawei Orders after US Tightens Restrictions,” Nikkei Asia, May 18, 2020, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Huawei-crackdown

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-new-Huawei-orders-after-US-tightens-restrictions. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT 15 percent of TSMC’s revenue: Ting-Fang and Li, “TSMC Halts New Huawei Orders.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT embedding secret “backdoors”: Pancevski, “Huawei Can Covertly Access Telecom Networks”; Allen-Ebrahimian, “Huawei Equipment Has

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/news/press-releases/2020/05/commerce-addresses-huaweis-efforts-undermine-entity-list-restricts.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 46: The Dominoes Fall TSMC also relied on American technologies: Chris Miller, “Just How Badly Does Apple Need China?” The Atlantic, December 28, 2022, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022

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/12/tsmc-apple-memory-chip-production-us-china-taiwan-relations/672593. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT but rather cut ties with Huawei: Kathrin Hille and Kiran

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Stacey, “TSMC Falls into Line with US Export Controls on Huawei,” Financial Times, June 9, 2020, www.ft.com/content/bad129d1-4543-4fe3-9ecb-15b3c917aca4. GO TO

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.S. Chip Facility, a Win for Trump,” The New York Times, May 14, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/technology/trump-tsmc-us-chip-facility.html; Debby Wu, “TSMC Scores Subsidies and Picks Site for $12 Billion U.S. Plant,” Bloomberg, June 9, 2020, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06

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-09/tsmc-confident-of-replacing-any-huawei-orders-lost-to-u-s-curbs; Virginia Heffernan, “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory,” Wired, March

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21, 2023, www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT UK government launched an emergency review: Helen Warrell and Nic Fildes, “UK Review of Huawei Eyes Impact of

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Commerce, February 24, 2022, www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2022/02/commerce-implements-sweeping-restrictions-exports-russia-response. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT TSMC and other big chipmakers: Jeanne Whalen, “Computer Chip Industry Begins Halting Deliveries to Russia in Response to U.S. Sanctions,” The Washington Post, February 25

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, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/ukraine-russia-chips-sanctions-tsmc. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Russian financial markets: George Steer and Tommy Stubbington, “Russian Stocks Swing Higher as Investors Weigh Sanctions Risks,” Financial Times

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, 260, 266, 268, 276–77, 280 ZTE and, 257–58, 260 Trump, Ivanka, 249, 267 Trump, Melania, 253 Trust Bank, 199 Tsipras, Alexis, 209–11 TSMC, 234, 268, 282, 290, 292, 293, 300, 340, 394, 407 Turkey, 3–4, 80, 84, 95, 99, 112, 323, 361, 365, 366, 376, 386–87

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt · 8 Apr 2025 · 260pp · 82,629 words

chip manufacturer, by unanimous consensus, was the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, whose massive complex in Tainan fabricated a significant portion of the world’s silicon. TSMC didn’t design its own chips; it simply manufactured chips for merchants like Nvidia. The rise of such independent “foundry” services was responsible for a

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surge in computing innovation, permitting upstarts to experiment with radical designs. TSMC filled orders with incomparable precision and efficiency, the product of an extraordinarily demanding work culture. Workers there described the hierarchical corporate structure as “militarized,” and

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they followed a “996” shift schedule, working from nine a.m. to nine p.m. six days a week. Huang had repeatedly failed to get TSMC’s attention. After leaving a series of voicemails, he’d written a personal letter to Morris Chang, the company’s CEO, and put it in

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passed over for the top spot—a snub that some observers attributed to anti-Asian racism. Chang then moved to Taiwan and took control of TSMC, which, under his leadership, grew to become the largest tech company in Asia. Chang took an immediate liking to Huang. “They were a very small

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. “I’m the only Chinese CEO of the time,” he said, “but it never occurred to me. And it doesn’t occur to me today.” TSMC was key to Nvidia’s long-term success, but the relationship got off to a difficult start. In early 1998

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, TSMC misapplied a chemical process at the end of the manufacturing process, introducing short circuits onto many of the chips. The mistake nearly ruined Nvidia, which

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-board partners. “We were close to bankruptcy that time, too,” Diercks said. “It’s not just a saying.” But over time, Nvidia’s relationship with TSMC proved to be of great mutual benefit to both companies, especially as Nvidia’s chips grew increasingly complex. For Huang, there was also a personal

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gave him a reason to go back to Taiwan, which he hadn’t visited since he was a child. Huang’s first visit to a TSMC factory in the late 1990s brought him inside one of the most sterile environments on the planet. Clad in booties, gloves, and head covering, he

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weeks of layering, the wafers were diced into individual chips by a diamond-crusted wire saw, then sent downstream for packaging. In a good year, TSMC’s factories might produce tens of millions of chips. Leaving the facilities, Huang returned to the country’s famous night markets to gorge on the

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line was the Radeon. The Radeon, like the GeForce, was a fan-cooled accelerator with parallel pixel pipelines. Its chips were manufactured in the same TSMC facility as the GeForce, and Kwok Yuen Ho, the company’s cofounder and CEO, was, like Huang, an immigrant with a fiercely competitive streak whose

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decorated with framed pictures of microchips. He was passionate about making computers run faster: at his “massively parallel” MasPar Corporation, he had attempted to implement TSMC’s 996 work schedule, asking employees to work twelve-hour shifts six days a week. Even after his company tanked, Nickolls never gave up on

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. Shortly after arriving at Nvidia in 2007, Huang had asked her to shorten the lead time on deliveries from a Taiwanese packaging vendor downstream from TSMC. Shoquist regarded this as an impossibility; Taiwan was famous for its efficiency, and she doubted that there was any gristle to trim from the process

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supercar. Huang had also purchased a large, beachfront vacation house in Maui with a sunset view. He often hosted friends there, including Morris Chang of TSMC, with whom he’d grown close. Huang’s great outside passion remained cooking. For one of his birthdays, his friends had arranged for him to

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. The focus of the device was matrix multiplication, which was to AI what Quake had been to graphics. The rebuild began at the atomic level. TSMC was now offering a manufacturing technique called “FinFET,” with transistors that jutted above the silicon substrate like a shark’s fin. If you could shrink

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. The scale of such an invasion, should it ever occur, would make D-Day look small. It would also be catastrophic for the global economy. TSMC’s manufacturing facilities in Taiwan were one of the major production chokepoints in the world. No facility anywhere approached the speed and precision with which

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TSMC produced the most advanced microchips. Slowdowns in Taiwan during the pandemic had delayed deliveries of automobiles for months. A war would create delays for years—

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that used a high-end microchip. To my great surprise, Nvidia had done no contingency planning for this eventuality. “If something happens to Taiwan and TSMC, the ramifications are so large it’s almost like asking me what I’d do if California fell into the ocean,” Deb Shoquist said. Shoquist

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been launched in Japan, South Korea, and the European Union. “In the semiconductor space, there is no globalization anymore,” Morris Chang told employees at a TSMC function in late 2023. “The priority is national security only.” On a patch of unclaimed desert in northern Phoenix

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, TSMC had cleared 1,100 acres of scrubland and was laying foundations for two massive chip-fabrication facilities. Though technically within Phoenix’s sprawling municipal borders,

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nearby Pyramid Peak, counted thirty-nine construction cranes in simultaneous operation, including a 180-foot Manitowoc crawler that could lift five million pounds at once. TSMC’s total budget for the Phoenix plants was forecast to exceed $40 billion, making it one of the largest foreign direct investments in the history

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would lag global rivals. (When Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022, Chang told her the US projects were “doomed to fail.”) Chang also argued that TSMC’s concentration in Taiwan was actually preventing a Chinese invasion, for no national economy would suffer as much as China’s if

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TSMC went offline. (He called this Taiwan’s “silicon shield.”) Still, when his favorite customer, Jensen Huang, toured the TSMC construction site in Phoenix in 2023, Chang was there to greet him with a smile. China

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that were the most critical component of the fabrication process, leaving China a decade behind. I wondered whether China might instead try to seize the TSMC plants in Taiwan and produce microchips themselves. A former US military official I spoke to regarded this as unlikely. “This is not like when Iraq

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, Broadcom, Supermicro, and others enjoyed record valuations. ASML, the Dutch company that built the light-printing machines, became the most valuable tech stock in Europe. TSMC, with its unrivaled fabrication facilities, became the most valuable tech stock in Asia. In March 2024, the Financial Times reported that Ferrari sales in Taiwan

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good CEO should be.” But the final word went to Morris Chang. He didn’t attribute Huang’s success to his work ethic, which, at TSMC, would have been considered slightly above average—nor did he find him especially adaptable. Chang was ninety-two years old when I spoke with him

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words

only to nearly 24 million people that China claims as its own but also to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The facility, known as the TSMC, is the source of more than half the world’s outsourced semiconductor manufacturing. Silicon Valley may design the chips, but Taiwan produces them. If we

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should actually read, “Designed by Apple in California. Chips Manufactured in Taiwan. Assembled in China.” And it’s not just every iPhone that relies on TSMC chips. So do laptops, video games, and F-35 fighter jets. In light of its centrality to the most important electronic equipment in the world

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, the TSMC is now the world’s tenth most valuable company.66 The TSMC had managed to straddle both sides of the Sino-U.S. tech divide, with American companies accounting for about 60

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percent of its business and Chinese firms making up another 20 percent. That was until Huawei cut ties in May 2020, following the announcement that TSMC would build a $12 billion chip-making facility in Arizona.67 Semiconductors “are one of the clearest chokepoints in the global technology trade,” says MacroPolo

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’s Matt Sheehan. “There are good substitutes to a lot of other tech, but there’s not a good substitute for TSMC.”68 And while today China doesn’t control Taiwan or its semiconductor production, Beijing has been busily developing the military capabilities it would need to

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fighter jets ventured across the Taiwan Strait more than at any point in thirty years, buzzing the island eight separate times in the month after TSMC announced it would build a new $12 billion manufacturing facility in Arizona.69 Following the reelection of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen on a platform

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’s agreement to construct a $12 billion facility in Arizona, with the company’s chairman citing state and federal subsidies as “a key factor in TSMC’s decision to set up a fab[rication plant] in the U.S.”28 More such investments will be necessary, in the semiconductor industry and

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, https://theodoreroosevelt.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=991271&module_id=339551&actr=4. 66 Eamon Barrett, “Intel’s decline makes rival chipmaker TSMC the world’s 10th most valuable company,” Fortune, July 28, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/07/28/intel-7nm-delay

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-tsmc-stock-shares-worlds-tenth-most-valuable-company/. 67 Sherisse Pham, “Taiwan chip maker TSMC’s $12 billion Arizona factory could give the US an edge in manufacturing,” CNN, May 15, 2020, https

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://www.cnn.com/2020/05/15/tech/tsmc-arizona-chip-factory-intl-hnk/index.html. 68 Eamon Barrett, “Semiconductors are a weapon in the U.S.-China trade war. Can this chipmaker serve

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, August 10, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/us-china-trade-war-semiconductors-chips-tsmc-chipmakers/. 69 “Chipmaker TSMC eyeing expansion of planned Arizona plant -sources,” Reuters, May 4, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/chipmaker-tsmc-eyeing-expansion-planned-arizona-plant-sources-2021-05-04/. 70 Steven Lee Myers and Javier

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,” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-chip-makers-including-intel-seek-semiconductor-self-sufficiency-11589103002. 28 Debby Wu, “TSMC Scores Subsidies and Picks Site for $12 Billion U.S. Plant,” Bloomberg, June 8, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09

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/tsmc-confident-of-replacing-any-huawei-orders-lost-to-u-s-curbs. 29 Marc Andreessen, “It’s Time to Build,” Andreessen Horowitz, https://a16z.com/2020/

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, Jamie, 75 Syria, 58, 62, 74, 138, 162, 203, 247 Taiwan, 33, 82, 97, 115, 134, 198, 204, 216, 222–24 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), 222–23, 240–41 Team Telecom, 106, 209 tech role reimagining, 250–59 telecommunications, 146, 190, 209 China and, xix, 13, 43, 90–94, 101

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway · 15 Jun 2023 · 515pp · 152,128 words

pay it. The Material World is where you will find the most important companies you’ve never heard of, companies like CATL, Wacker, Codelco, Shagang, TSMC and ASML. These names may mean nothing to you, but they are just as important, perhaps more important, than the familiar brands everyone has heard

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iPhone chip at the time of writing – are in fact manufactured by another company altogether, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or, as it’s better known, TSMC. That company in turn was only able to make the chip with the help of machines made by another, even more obscure company, ASML. And

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and Technology Park, but it is better known as the main production hub for a company whose name is emblazoned in red on the buildings: TSMC. This is Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world. That the building is here at all is testament to a man called Morris

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. But over the following years, in much the same way as the Prussian state helped the glass industry of Jena, the Taiwanese government steadily supported TSMC. What really set it apart from established rivals like Texas Instruments or Intel was its business model: while those companies designed and manufactured the chips

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themselves, TSMC would make chips for other people – it would be a ‘foundry’. If you are looking for a company that embodies the Material World, you could

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hardly do better than TSMC. Here is a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla, or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and

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one of the world’s most valuable, and most important, companies. But this dominance does not come cheap. Over a three-year period from 2021, TSMC was budgeting to invest $135 billion, more than many developed countries would outlay over that period, and the equivalent of ten US Gerald R. Ford

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factory will overtake Fab 18 in cost terms in the next few years and the likelihood is it will be another semiconductor plant, possibly another TSMC plant. Such is the logic of Moore’s law, where every two years the transistors must get smaller and the factories more expensive.fn3 The

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it is ultimately just bouncing light around a box, but this is no ordinary light and no ordinary box. After all, recall that the transistors TSMC wants to make are so small they are quite literally invisible, so a conventional wavelength laser and a series of lenses will no longer do

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the First World War. The Chip War As of this moment, ASML is the only company in the world capable of making these machines, and TSMC is, alongside Samsung, the only company capable of putting such technology into mass production. Intel, which long dominated the industry, is often regarded as lagging

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already been widening rather than narrowing for some time. A decade ago SMIC’s technology was four years behind TSMC’s. Today SMIC is thought to be 10 or 12 years behind TSMC, despite a flood of government money being unleashed on the sector. In much the same way as they vied

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, which further intensifies the tension in this part of the world. As Morris Chang put it in 2019, ‘As the world is no longer peaceful, TSMC is gaining vital importance in geostrategic terms.’7 And the scale of this reliance is greater than you might imagine. China spends more money on

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number of processes involved, the quantity of companies playing a part. The media frequently writes about Apple, sometimes about Foxconn. Occasionally specialist outlets write about TSMC and maybe even ASML. They cite the centrality of Taiwan and the Netherlands to the semiconductor supply chain. But this is only the tip of

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experienced into a single country, without relying on companies or imports from other parts of the world. Even if China invaded Taiwan and even if TSMC’s fabs survived the assault (some have suggested that the company incorporates explosives into the foundations, to be detonated upon invasion much as armies destroy

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are made, but they are mostly designed elsewhere, primarily in the US, with intellectual property that derives from a company based in Cambridge, England: ARM. TSMC’s fabs would not function without machine tools from the Netherlands and Japan, or chemicals from Germany and bits and pieces from a range of

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, 148 , 157 tailings 270 , 272 , 293 , 300 Tainan, Taiwan 107–8 Taiwan 34 , 59 , 65 , 107 , 115 , 116 , 119 , 120 , 148 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 13 , 93 , 108–10 , 112 , 114–15 , 116 , 119 , 120 , 128 , 212 Tata Chemicals (company) 155 , 357 , 358 TDK (company) 402 Teal, Gordon 102n tectonic

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, 99–100 , 109 and n , 112 , 429 tritium 376 Trump, Donald 204 , 205 , 411 Trumpf (company) 93 , 113 Tskitishvili, Enver 195 , 210 , 211 , 212 , 213 TSMC see Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company tundishes 226 tungsten 53 , 277 , 278 Tupperware 354 turbines 257 , 435–6 see also wind turbines Turkey 47 , 95 , 217

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth

by Guillaume Pitron · 14 Jun 2023 · 271pp · 79,355 words

sorts of objects. A handful of companies, such as Samsung in South Korea, Intel and Qualcomm in the US, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)21 now produce some 100 billion chips every year for everything from laptop computers, washing machines, and rockets to, of course, mobile phones.22 It

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has a computer that is 100 times more powerful than the best computers designed thirty years ago’, says Jean-Pierre Colinge, a former engineer at TSMC, who couldn’t help but add: ‘And when you know that they’re mainly used for taking selfies, it’s a bit galling.’24 Especially

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to keep costs down;26 from there they are sent to Foxconn in China to be put into iPhones; and to optimise all these processes, TSMC would use software developed by Italian and Scottish universities.27 The logistics alone ‘consume an absolutely monstrous amount of energy’, says the researcher Karine Samuel

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boasting the increasingly high performance of their electronic products speaks for itself’, says Colinge. Enslaved to the technical specifications of its clients, companies such as TSMC are doomed to multiply its technological prowess in record time. Soon, patterning transistors of five to seven nanometres will not be enough to stay in

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the game, with TSMC having already committed to lowering the count to three nanometres, or even one nanometre. In these conditions, ‘Never has the company’s energy consumption been

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this concerning’, says the former TSMC engineer.30 So it comes as no surprise that the total amount of fuel burned is hundreds of times higher than the final weight of

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more electronics per capita than anywhere else in the world.33 The island nation located 180 kilometres from the coast of China is home to TSMC, which alone represents over half of the global manufacture of semiconductors. In recent years, it has also had to contend with myriad accusations of pollution

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, but producing one kilogram of silicon purportedly generates some 280 kilograms of chemicals.35 Not all the waste is treated, and since 2013 several of TSMC’s subcontractors, including the electronics groups ASE Korea and Nerca, have had to suspend their operations after spilling toxic substances into nearby rivers.36 Colinge

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with deionised water [purer than distilled water] at every step of the manufacturing process, it takes a lot of water to develop chips’. This puts TSMC’s water consumption at some 156,000 tonnes per day. Although 86 per cent of it is recycled, Colinge recalls a recent episode involving his

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former employer.37 ‘Taiwan was hit with a drought in 2017, but TSMC needed so much water that it had to transport it by the truckload from a river close to the factories. ‘There were so many heavy

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industrial park of 1,400 hectares in the north of Taiwan].’38 More staggering still is TSMC’s energy consumption: ‘The smaller the object you produce, the larger energy-guzzling machines you need’, adds Colinge. TSMC’s factories in Taiwan supposedly require the equivalent of three nuclear reactors to operate, or 3

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-Lin Li, ‘The rate of lung cancer is fifteen times higher here than in Taipei.’42 As a result, the sector’s management boards (with TSMC in the lead) recently issued the order to shift to renewable energies. But why did it take so long to react? ‘The microelectronics industry has

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be the source of environmental and health impacts’, says Li.43 Does the economic clout of this strategic industrial sector bypass all checks and balances? ‘TSMC is so important to Taiwan that the authorities would give them anything they ask for’, he says. The reality is that the demands for change

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in Taiwan’s industry are being made by foreign clients. Like TSMC, ‘companies are under immense pressure by groups such as Apple, which want their suppliers to transition to green energy’, says Li. But it’s too

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and Atomic Energy Commission. See leti-cea.com. 20 An invention which earned Jack Kilby (1923–2005) the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. 21 TSMC: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. 22 ‘The chip industry can proclaim 1 trillion served’, Market Watch, 4 February 2019. 23 Just as the surface of the

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price of a Citroën 2CV’, says François Martin. 24 Interview with Jean-Pierre Colinge, director from 2012 to 2017 at the chief technology office of TSMC, 2020. 25 Ibid. 26 The package enables electric contacts between the chip and the printed circuit board. 27 Ibid. 28 Interview with Karine Samuel, 2019

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of control’, CommonWealth Magazine, vol. 568, 18 March 2015. 37 Interview with Jean-Pierre Colinge, 2020. 38 When another drought hit the country in 2021, TSMC sent water tankers back to the river. Read ‘Taiwan’s chip industry under threat as drought turns critical’, Nikkei Asia, 25 February 2021. 39 ‘The

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber · 29 Oct 2024 · 292pp · 106,826 words

to ensure that the country had indigenous research and development abilities. This led to the founding of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), which pioneered a unique business model that involved exclusively building chips designed by other companies. As with many other bubbles, they took a somewhat faith

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-based approach. Not only did TSMC have to believe demand for chip fabrication would continue to exist, it had to believe that this demand wouldn’t be met by companies with

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and a member of the Fairchild diaspora, once put it: “Now hear me and hear me well. Real men have fabs!” 234 TSMC’s approach borrowed some elements from the Fairchild model. While TSMC didn’t design chips, it did recognize that making chip design easier would be a competitive advantage, so

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TSMC worked closely with chip designers to ensure there was plenty of demand for its foundries. The company also strove to commoditize the design business—if

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there were more companies inventing new chips and fewer companies manufacturing them, they reasoned, the manufacturers would be able to set their own price. TSMC’s strategy effectively redefined the market, creating a separation between the capital-intensive business of fabricating chips and the more asset-light business of designing

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reshaped the industry. With each new generation of chips, more companies can design them while fewer are equipped to manufacture them. Today, only Samsung and TSMC can make the most recent generation of chips, while Intel is years behind their efforts. The industry that started with a full-scale monopoly—Fairchild

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the miraculous process involved in endowing sand with intelligence, it’s no wonder some have proclaimed that they saw the “face of God” etched into TSMC-produced semiconductors. Virginia Heffernan, “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory,” Wired, March 21, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw

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-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/. 375 Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 376 1 Corinthians, 15:51. 377 Alan Turing, “Computing Machines and Intelligence

Running Money

by Andy Kessler · 4 Jun 2007 · 323pp · 92,135 words

had a fab they weren’t using completely and maybe wanted to rent us some space.” “Did you ﬁnd one around here?” “No, we found TSMC instead.” “Who?” “The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. All they do is run a fab and sell ﬁnished wafers to us at a ﬁxed price. We

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Far East was coming up, so I scheduled a side trip to Taipei. It was a bit more than a day trip to Kansas City. TSMC was located in Hsinchu City, a bumpy hour-plus cab ride from Taipei. I had never been to Taiwan before, but I had a whopping

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, but now I do—14 pages’ worth. The address was simply Science-based Industrial Park. The taxi driver never heard of TSMC. This was 1991. By 2001, he probably worked for TSMC. I was met in the lobby by Dr. Morris Chang. “OK, let’s go then. You’ll need a bunny

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him, lest he break out in song. “Here is a photo of our chip, pretty small, doesn’t cost us more than $5 in volume. TSMC in Taiwan makes it for us. Over here is the harmonizer, the pitch control, tempo stabilizer. Here is a DSP to do Fourier transforms. There

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City.” “Yeah, I’ve been there.” “Not the most exciting place in the world. So, anyway, we pay $750K on a set of masks. Then TSMC—you know those guys, the foundry?” “Yup.” “They take the masks, which are like photograph negatives but the lines are 0.18 microns wide, and

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government stats—it’s practically invisible. Often, an entire architecture of a billion-in-sales chip can be e-mailed to that Wealth How? 259 TSMC factory in Taiwan, without a cash register ringing or a Commerce Department employee around to measure the export. That chip and other intellectual property are

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, 124, 126, 180. See also microchips transportation, 92–95 Treasuries, U.S., 163, 260, 261, 262, 274, 281 trends. See waterfalls Triangle Trade, 66–67 TSMC. See Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Tsuji, Haruo, 157–58 turbine engine, 94–95 Tut Systems, 145, 217, 219 Tyco, 290 UCLA, 184, 185, 187 unfair