The Story of How TSMC Came to Dominate the World
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2021
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In every conversation about computer chips, it always comes back to the dominant player: TSMC. Founded in the 1980s, it's far and away the biggest and most advanced manufacturer. And, as our guest points out, it's virtually impossible to find any piece of consumer tech hardware that Taiwan Semi hasn't touched in some way. On this episode, we speak with Tim Culpan, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who has been reporting from Taipei for over 20 years, about how the company came to be, why it's so dominant, its geopolitical importance, and what could plausibly dislodge it.
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| 0:00.0 | Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference, |
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| 0:45.0 | I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:48.0 | So obviously Tracy, we've been talking a lot about chips lately, but for all the episodes we've been talking a lot about chips lately but for all the episodes we've done we haven't |
| 0:56.0 | hit like what is sort of a I guess I would say the elephant in the room or the gorilla in the |
| 1:01.7 | room that keeps coming up over and over again. |
| 1:06.2 | Yeah, we've been going at it, I would say from a US perspective, very focused on the troubles at Intel but we haven't really talked about the |
| 1:15.8 | success story that is Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing company better known |
| 1:21.1 | as T.S. M. C. Yeah exactly right. So every episode that we do it |
| 1:26.4 | sort of comes back to them what a juggernaut they've become and of course you |
| 1:30.8 | know the sort of basic story is that manufacturing chips is extremely hard. |
| 1:37.0 | It's extremely expensive and it's very difficult to do at scale. |
| 1:42.8 | Intel is one of the rare companies that designs and |
| 1:47.4 | manufacturers its own chips. |
| 1:49.4 | But that for a lot of these companies that are sort of exploding, gaining market share, they're having Taiwan |
| 1:56.7 | semi manufacture them and Taiwan semi is getting extremely good or is extremely good at manufacturing and maybe |
| 2:04.8 | pulling away from Intel to some extent in terms of its manufacturing |
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