TSMC is the world’s largest contract semiconductor manufacturer.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, commonly abbreviated TSMC, operates as a foundry: it manufactures chips designed by other companies rather than primarily selling chips under its own consumer brand. It was founded in Taiwan in 1987 by Morris Chang and helped establish the dedicated foundry model used widely by modern chip designers.
TSMC manufactures advanced processors for customers including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm. Its leading-edge production has made it strategically important to smartphones, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. TSMC is frequently ranked among the world’s richest companies by market capitalization because its manufacturing capacity supports much of the global semiconductor industry. It is not the same type of business as Intel, which historically designed and manufactured its own processors, or Nvidia, which designs chips and relies on foundries for production.