TSMC (Remastered)
Episode publishedPodcast: AcquiredAcquired
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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
And it turns out they even manufacture a lot of chips for Intel too. Yes. 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.
Yep. Well, listeners, without doing too much foreshadowing, now is a very good time for anyone to listen or relisten 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.
Then, 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 550,000,000,000 to over a $1,000,000,000,000. And in fact, you were the one that tipped me off to this as we were re researching here. They and Saudi Aramco are the only $1,000,000,000,000 companies in the world that are not located on the West Coast of the United States. Wild.
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 a extreme outlier TSMC is. So without further ado, the story is truly unbelievable, and we hope you enjoy this presentation of TSMC remastered. 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. And
I'm David Rosenthal. 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 9th largest company in the world episode.
This is 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 gonna tell the whole story here. It's wild.
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 episo
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