TSMC is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry by revenue.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Its business model focused on manufacturing chips designed by other companies, rather than competing with customers by selling its own branded processors. This helped create the modern fabless semiconductor industry.
TSMC manufactures advanced chips for customers including Apple, AMD, and Nvidia. Its factories, known as fabs, use increasingly sophisticated processes measured in nanometers. Smaller process nodes generally allow more transistors to fit on a chip, although performance also depends on architecture and design.
TSMC is often discussed among the world’s most valuable companies because demand for artificial-intelligence processors, smartphones, and high-performance computing has increased the strategic importance of advanced chip production. It is not the same company as Samsung Electronics, which both designs and manufactures products.