Who founded TSMC in 1987 and served as its first chairman?

Morris Chang founded TSMC in 1987 and served as its first chairman. He established Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company around a then-unusual business model: manufacturing chips designed by other companies.

Before TSMC, many semiconductor companies both designed and manufactured their own processors. TSMC specialized in contract manufacturing, allowing customers to design chips without building and operating their own fabrication plants.

That model helped create the modern “fabless” semiconductor industry. Companies such as Nvidia can concentrate on chip architecture while relying on foundries such as TSMC for large-scale production.

TSMC became one of the world’s most valuable companies as advanced chips grew central to smartphones, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Chang was born in China, studied in the United States, and spent much of his earlier career at Texas Instruments before moving to Taiwan.