TSMC manufactures processors designed by companies such as Apple and Nvidia. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the world’s best-known dedicated semiconductor foundry and is headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Morris Chang founded TSMC in 1987 with a business model centered on producing chips designed by other companies. This separated chip design from manufacturing and helped create the modern “fabless” semiconductor industry.
TSMC does not generally sell consumer electronics under its own brand. Instead, customers supply chip designs and TSMC fabricates them on advanced production lines. This distinction separates it from integrated manufacturers such as Intel and Samsung, which both design and manufacture many of their own chips.
The company is especially important in smartphones, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and graphics processors. Its leading-edge process technologies and enormous fabrication investments have made it one of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization.