TSMC is widely regarded as the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry.
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 pure-play foundry model allowed firms such as Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm to outsource production while concentrating on chip design. TSMC's advanced process technologies became especially important for high-performance computing and artificial-intelligence hardware.
TSMC is not the same kind of company as Intel or Samsung Electronics. Those firms also design and sell their own chips, while TSMC's central role is contract manufacturing for a broad range of customers.