Tagged TSMC · show all articles
Morris Chang founded TSMC on a bet the rest of the industry considered dubious: a chipmaker that designs nothing of its own. It became the single structural precondition for the fabless industry this cohort spends most of its pages covering.
"Foundry" gets used constantly in AI hardware coverage without ever being explained. The concept it names is simpler than it sounds, and its history explains almost everything else in this cohort's foundry briefings.
Nvidia designs. AMD designs. Apple designs. Almost none of them manufacture. One Taiwanese company makes the leading-edge chips for nearly everyone who doesn't, and that single fact shapes more of the AI boom than any GPU announcement.
Every AI accelerator headline is about the die. The actual ceiling on how many of them the world can build in 2026 sits one manufacturing step later, in a packaging process most coverage never names.
Building a leading-edge fab outside Taiwan was long treated as economically irrational. TSMC is doing it anyway, at a scale that has quadrupled since the first announcement — and the reasons are as much about customers as about geopolitics.
Four major forecasters, four different 2030 semiconductor-market numbers, none of them wrong. A methodology-first look at why "the" 2030 forecast doesn't exist, and how to actually use the spread.
Every other company in this cohort sells silicon, licenses it, or manufactures it for someone else. Apple designs some of the most advanced chips in the industry and has built its entire strategy around never putting one up for sale.