TSMC (Remastered)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Hello, Acquired listeners. We regularly get feedback that this episode on TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is one of the best Acquired episodes ever. And interestingly, it predates our Nvidia episodes. We did it way back in 2021 when the Acquired audience was about 12% the size of what it is today, which means that the vast majority of you have never heard it. So we definitely wanted to fix that. Since then, Semiconductors have become so much more important in our world, and TSMC has essentially become the only manufacturer of the leading edge chips. They make the primary chip inside every MacBook and iPhone shipped today. They're powering the AI wave, manufacturing all of Nvidia's chips. They make the chips for a whole bunch of other fabless companies like Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers like AWS.

**David Rosenthal** (0:55)
And it turns out, they even manufacture a lot of chips for Intel too. Little known fact. Yeah, TSMC rode the smartphone era to crazy heights as we all know. And here now in the next AI era, here in 2025, it turns out that they are the manufacturing superpower behind all of that too.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:14)
Yep. Well, listeners, without doing too much foreshadowing, now is a very good time for anyone to listen or re-listen to the TSMC episode. So we decided we should go all the way back to the raw audio tracks and remaster this whole thing from scratch for your listening pleasure.

**David Rosenthal** (1:32)
Ben, in fact, I looked it up since we were going back to 2021 when we initially recorded this. TSMC's market cap has doubled since then from 550 billion to over a trillion dollars. And in fact, you're the one that tipped me off to this as we were re-researching here. They and Saudia Aramco are the only trillion dollar companies in the world that are not located on the west coast of the United States. Wild.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
This is such a crazy stat. It's crazy that the rest are located on the west coast of the United States, but it really underscores what an extreme outlier TSMC is. So without further ado, the story is truly unbelievable, and we hope you enjoy this presentation of TSMC Remastered. Who got the truth?
Welcome to Season 9, Episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I am Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:40)
And I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:42)
And we are your hosts. 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** (2:55)
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** (3:10)
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** (3:56)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:57)
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. And we've had TSMC on the agenda to do for like two and a half years now in our little Google doc.

**David Rosenthal** (4:18)
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.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:25)
The ARM episode.

**David Rosenthal** (4:27)
Sequoia Part 1, PA Semi. Yup.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:30)
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.