TSMC was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, later called the father of Taiwan’s chip industry.
Chang established Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company after a long career in the semiconductor industry, including senior leadership at Texas Instruments. TSMC pioneered the dedicated semiconductor foundry model: it manufactures chips designed by other companies rather than competing with customers by selling its own branded processors.
That business model allowed many firms to design chips without building their own expensive fabrication plants. TSMC subsequently became a crucial manufacturer for companies producing advanced processors for smartphones, computers, data centers, and artificial-intelligence systems.
Morris Chang was born in Ningbo, China, in 1931 and studied at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. He retired as TSMC’s chairman in 2018. C. C. Wei, a later TSMC chief executive, is a different person; Jensen Huang is Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, not TSMC’s founder.