Why are we so dependent on Taiwan for microchips? Why couldn’t these be manufactured elsewhere, in addition to Taiwan?
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TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited) is the largest microchip manufacturing and design company in the world, controlling 51% of the microchip market. The second and third largest producers are Samsung and Intel.
Only these three companies can even produce today’s most advanced microchips. Microchip production relies upon extremely expensive factories and foundries. TSMC’s latest factory cost $19.5 billion.
So TSMC simply became the biggest player in the industry, with the massive capital required to manufacture semiconductors. TSMC is also majority-owned by foreign investors, the top ten of which are American investment firms. The company started in 1987 as a collaboration between the government of Taiwan, the tech giant Philips, as well as private investors with an interest in semiconductor technology. It’s stayed at the forefront of the industry since.
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