TSMC

TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor foundry and manufactures advanced chips for companies such as NVIDIA and Apple.

TSMC is the world's largest foundry (consignment manufacturing) company that produces semiconductors designed by other companies and is headquartered in Taiwan. Most of the world's cutting-edge chips, such as NVIDIA's AI chips and Apple's iPhone chips, are made at TSMC factories.

As demand for cutting-edge chips exploded due to the AI boom, TSMC's status has become more solid. It maintains a gap with Samsung Electronics and Intel in cutting-edge processes, and also holds a bottleneck in advanced packaging technology essential for AI chips. In fact, the entire global AI industry is dependent on the production capacity of this one company.

As production is concentrated in Taiwan, geopolitical tensions with China are mentioned as a potential risk to the global economy, and to reduce this, we are diversifying by building factories in the United States, Japan, and Europe. This is where the term “Silicon Shield” came from, meaning that semiconductors are the shield that protects Taiwan.

✅ Strengths

• It has overwhelming technological power and market share in the consignment production of cutting-edge semiconductors
• It has secured the world's top companies such as NVIDIA and Apple as customers
• We even have advanced packaging capabilities, which are the bottleneck in AI chip production.

⚠️ Limits

• The geopolitical risk is very high as production facilities are concentrated in Taiwan
• There are increased costs and manpower issues due to expansion of overseas factories
• The burden of investment in advanced processes is increasing.