What is the name of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s business model?

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s business model is a pure-play foundry.

A pure-play foundry manufactures semiconductor chips designed by other companies. TSMC does not generally sell chips under its own consumer brand; instead, it provides manufacturing processes and production capacity to customers such as fabless chip designers.

Morris Chang founded TSMC in Taiwan in 1987, creating a business model that separated chip design from chip manufacturing. This allowed smaller or specialized designers to develop processors without building their own extremely expensive fabrication plants.

The term is often confused with “fabless,” which describes a company that designs chips but outsources manufacturing. TSMC is the foundry that manufactures those designs. An integrated device manufacturer, by contrast, typically designs and manufactures its own chips, as Intel historically did.