Signage for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) at the company’s headquarters in Hsinchu, … [+]
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Limited (TSMC) is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of semiconductor chips that power our phones, laptops, cars, and fridges. It is the world’s largest chip foundry with some big clients like Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidea, helping it to achieve $45 billion in revenue in 2020.
You’ve likely never heard of TSMC though it is powering many of the devices in your life. It is one of the world’s 10 largest companies with a market cap of $468 billion with its top ten shareholders comprising big U.S. pension funds and banks. And it is in Taiwan.
Founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, the Taiwanese American, it was the world’s first and largest chip foundry. Born in Ningbo, Chekiang in China, Chang enrolled in university in the U.S. to attend Harvard, changing to MIT in his sophomore year. A career spent in the semiconductor industry with firms like Texas Instruments he returned to Taiwan to take advantage of firms outsourcing manufacturing capabilities to Asia and started TSMC.
Renowned tech investor Bill Tai was hired as a consultant to the management team as the company was being established and issued a lucky badge number : A001. Known as the “master of work and play”, Tai has a portfolio of hot tech investments and was an early investor in firms like Canva, Dapper Labs, Lineage Logistics, Tweetdeck/Twitter, and Zoom Video among others. He is the Chair of publicly listed Hut8Mining, among the largest digital asset miners in North America and an early investor and former board director of Bitfury, a pioneer in ASIC based bitcoin mining and blockchain services.
Employee number one: photo image of Bill Tai’s employee badge A001 at TSMC
Together with Bitfury founder Valery Vavilov and Vice-Chair George Kikvadze, Tai created the Necker Blockchain Summit in 2015, a forum dedicated to the development of blockchain technologies for positive environmental and social impact, and the birthplace of the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC). GBBC is dedicated to harnessing blockchain technology to create more secure, equitable, and functional societies across the globe.
I caught up with Tai at the recent summit in between industry and regulatory panels, moonshot pitches, leadership addresses, and kite surfing and spoke to him about TSMC.
“TSMC is the biggest chip foundry on the planet with silicon in most of the devices in your house and your life, the 10th biggest company in the world in market value, and most people will never have heard of it,” says Tai.
Tai, an engineering graduate of the University of Illinois with a Harvard MBA, left silicon valley in 1987 to join James Dykes, the onetime director of GE’s semiconductor operations, who was enlisted by Chang to lead the project that year.
Adds Tai “Morris Chang’s vision has literally changed the world; not only has it become the foundational underpinning to 100 percent of America’s mainstream technology companies, the concept of a chip foundry was groundbreaking. It’s become one of the world’s largest and most important tech companies.”
This week’s visit to Taipei by Democrat House Leader Nancy Pelosi has been celebrated by the Taiwanese and has infuriated the Chinese, who are now conducting large-scale military drills around the island.
“The current tensions in Taiwan should raise awareness that there is a lot more at stake with China than a historic territorial claim. Taiwanese companies play a big role in the global tech landscape and TSMC is the very baseline foundation that supports the most critical part of the global semiconductor ecosystem. It is a mission-critical company in mission-critical industry,” adds Tai.
The current tensions in Taiwan along with rising inflation, record high energy prices, and the prospect of global food shortages, make the slump in cryptoasset prices and insolvency of a handful of over-leveraged players appear almost inconsequential and more the normal course of the market cycle in declining and price volatile markets.
The brain trust assembled at the summit is busy solving today’s problems to help Ukrainians, manage the global food shortage, and better help governments’ legislate a complex technology ecosystem while ideating and creating tomorrow’s billion-dollar business with blockchain and digital asset technologies.
Concludes Tai, “TSMC plays a critical role in the economy today and underpinning our digital future. I’m so lucky to have been around to witness its formative period. While I lost my physical badge long ago, I’m lucky that I have a photo of it.
I am also so proud to have played a part in creating the Necker Blockchain Summit, as blockchains become an underpinning to modern software systems. The Necker Summit has already spawned a lot of innovation in industry, NGOs, and government, since 2015, and keeps going from strength to strength with some of the smartest people in the world, all long on digital and blockchain.”