TSMC (Remastered)
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
4.8 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2025
⏱️ 148 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We dive into the unbelievable and unlikely history behind the quietest technology giant of them all: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Founded in 1987 by the then-56 year old Morris Chang, already a legend in the semiconductor industry by virtue of his meteoric rise and fall at Texas Instruments, TSMC today manufactures nearly all the leading-edge chips for Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, and yes — even Intel. Tune in for an incredible story of innovation, perseverance and lasers. Lots and lots of lasers!
Note: this is a remastered version of our original 2021 episode. We don’t often re-release old episodes, but in this case we have a very timely reason for doing so. Stay tuned! :)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, acquired listeners. We regularly get feedback that this episode on TSM, the Taiwan |
| 0:07.1 | Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is one of the best acquired episodes ever. And interestingly, |
| 0:13.4 | it predates our NVIDIA episodes. We did it way back in 2021 when the acquired audience was about |
| 0:20.4 | 12% the size of what it is today, |
| 0:22.8 | which means that the vast majority of you have never heard it. So we definitely wanted to fix that. |
| 0:28.2 | Since then, semiconductors have become so much more important in our world, and TSM has |
| 0:33.7 | essentially become the only manufacturer of the leading edge chips. They make the primary chip |
| 0:40.3 | inside every MacBook and iPhone shipped today. They're powering the AI wave, manufacturing all of |
| 0:46.0 | Nvidia's chips. They make the chips for a whole bunch of other fabless companies like Qualcomm, |
| 0:51.0 | AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers like AWS. |
| 0:55.2 | And it turns out they even manufacture a lot of chips for Intel, too. |
| 1:00.2 | Yes. |
| 1:00.5 | Little known fact. |
| 1:01.9 | Yeah, TSM rode the smartphone era to crazy heights, as we all know. |
| 1:05.9 | 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. |
| 1:14.5 | Yep. Well, listeners, without doing too much foreshadowing, now is a very good time for anyone to listen or relisten to the TSM episode. |
| 1:23.8 | So we decided we should go all the way back to the raw audio tracks and remaster |
| 1:28.6 | this whole thing from scratch for your listening pleasure. Ben, in fact, I looked it up since we |
| 1:34.0 | were going back to 2021 when we initially recorded this. TSM's market cap has doubled since then |
| 1:40.6 | from $550 billion to over a trillion dollars. And in fact, you were the one that |
| 1:46.4 | tip me off to this as we were re-researching here. They and Saudi Aramco are the only |
| 1:52.3 | trillion-dollar companies in the world that are not located on the west coast of the United |
... |
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