TSMC

**Ben Gilbert** (0:32)
I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:44)
And we are your hosts. Well, listeners, David and I are coming at you live, well, sort of live, together from Seattle in person, first time since our Ethereum episode, David.

**David Rosenthal** (0:55)
That's right, which was not that long ago. Love that we're back in the swing of things.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
I know. It feels, listeners, you probably don't notice a difference, but it feels totally different to be doing this with you in person, David, in full 3D.

**David Rosenthal** (1:08)
The energy in the room is electric.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:11)
Well, today's episode is on TSMC or the Taiwan semiconductor Company. It is your classic, most people have never heard of it, but it's the ninth largest company in the world episode.

**David Rosenthal** (1:23)
It's wild. Morris Chang founded TSMC at age 56, retired at 74, then came back at age 78, into the deal to make all of Apple's chips. And yeah, we're going to tell the whole story here. It's wild.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:38)
It's nuts. They make literally every chip in every iPhone sold today and soon to be in every Mac sold. If you're excited at all about Nvidia, AMD, qualcomm, or even any of the chips that Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are making, all of those chips or nearly all of them are actually made by TSMC, along with all the chips in your cars and your smart home devices and fighter jets and everything. Unbelievably, this company that the entire world relies on is on an island that some countries feel is a sovereign nation and the People's Republic of China feels is actually theirs. So today's episode has it all, ascending from startup to tech superpower, an underdog founder, and of course, a good dose of geopolitics.

**David Rosenthal** (2:25)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:26)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:32)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and can run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:57)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:03)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe of course locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:21)
Yep, obviously it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after of course the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:37)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:53)
Yep. If you, your company or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusoecloud.com/acquired that's crusoecloud.com/acquired or click the link in the show notes. All right. Well, listeners, it finally felt like the right time to do this episode amidst this global chip shortage that we've got going on that David, I think I've heard even Ford has paused the production of F-150s because of this. So it is like a massive impact on the world. I think we've had TSMC on the agenda to do for like two and a half years now on our little Google doc.

**David Rosenthal** (4:31)
Totally. Well, I feel like we haven't called it a mini series, but let's call it a mini series on semiconductors and like silicon Arm episode, Arm episode, the Sequoia part one.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:42)
That's right.

**David Rosenthal** (4:42)
We've done a ton of the PA semi.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:45)
Yep. Okay, listeners, it is time to jump into the history and facts and David's going to lead us in that. But as usual, even though we're going to be probably very excited about some companies, less excited about other companies, this show is not investment advice. We may have investments in the companies we discuss. It's for entertainment and informational purposes only. And you should do all of your own research, even if you listen to the show for research purposes, go do other research too.