My understanding is that 1 company in Taiwan makes the greatest chips in the world and no one else can replicate them. How is that possible?
In: Engineering
Its not
TSMC is a factory / machinery provider, other people buy time on its machinery and make THEIR designs.
TSMC doesn’t design chips, it simply mass produces them cheaply and reliably.
It also doesn’t make the machines it makes chips with, it buys them.
So REALLY, TSMC just buys a huge amount of chip making machines, employs a very skilled workforce to use said machines, and leases those machines operational hours on favourable rates to others.
Chip foundries are expensive and to be profitable you need to run them 24/7/365
Intel makes 70% of the worlds PC’s it can run its fabs none stop, AMD makes 20%, better and cheaper to forward order hours for new products then pick up slack hours for the back orders.
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