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! :)Sponsors:Many thanks to our fantastic partners:VantaJ.P. Morgan PaymentsStatsigLinks:Episode SourcesCarve Outs:Ted Lasso (Season 1)GreekWho is Michael Ovitz?More Acquired:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
Full Episode
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.
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 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.
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 were the one that tipped me off to this as we were re-researching here.
They and Saudi Aramco are the only trillion-dollar 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 an extreme outlier TSMC is. So without further ado, the story is truly unbelievable, and we hope you enjoy this presentation of TSMC Remastered.
Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way.
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