TSMC, formally Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, manufactures chips designed by many of the world’s most valuable technology companies.
TSMC pioneered the dedicated semiconductor foundry model. Instead of selling mainly its own branded processors, it manufactures designs created by customers such as Nvidia, Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm. This separation lets chip designers outsource fabrication while TSMC concentrates on manufacturing technology and scale.
The company is one of the world’s most valuable businesses by market capitalization because advanced chips are essential to smartphones, data centers, artificial intelligence, automobiles, and many other products. Its leading-edge process technologies are particularly important for high-performance computing.
TSMC is headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan. It is not the same as Nvidia, which designs many AI processors, or ASML, which makes the specialized lithography machines used by chip manufacturers.