Late one evening in 2010, in his Taipei home, Morris Chang topped off the wine in his guest’s glass. Across from him sat Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, who had flown in with a proposal that was as audacious as it was simple.Williams got straight to the point: We want to move the iPhone’s chipmaking to TSMC, but on a production line so advanced it existed only on paper.
TSMC had just poured billions into perfecting its current 28‑nanometer process, circuits roughly one‑ten‑thousandth the width of a human hair. Apple was asking for 20 nm, an even tighter scale that wasn’t on TSMC’s roadmap.Saying yes meant undertaking a frantic, high-stakes race to build new capacity from scratch. But CEO Morris Chang did not flinch. He listened calmly as Williams spoke. (By Chang’s own count, the Apple exec did 80% of the talking that night.)
Chang later told his team that “Missing Apple would cost us far more,” as he authorized a crash program to build the new production line. It’s a gamble of nearly half of TSMC’s cash reserves: A $9 billion investment, with 6,000 people working around the clock. In a record 11 months.That single decision, to go all-in for Apple, would rewire the entire semiconductor industry. It changed everything.
Fifteen years later, at 9:32 AM on July 9, 2025, the unthinkable flashed across trading desks worldwide: NVIDIA — a company once known only for its video-game graphics chips — had just dethroned Apple as the world’s most valuable company, with a staggering $4 trillion market cap.On Wall Street, traders whooped and headlines blared. Half a planet away in Taiwan, inside a humming TSMC fab, engineers in cleanroom suits stayed focused on their monitors. No applause, no champagne, just the steady whir of machines laying down atoms on silicon wafers. They didn’t need to cheer. The milestone had been engineered long ago.
By July 2025, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) had quietly grown into a trillion-dollar colossus itself, firmly in the world’s top ten by market value, well ahead of stalwarts like JPMorgan and Walmart and Visa.Worth barely a tenth of that was Intel, once the chip industry’s lodestar. All these were the direct result of a paradigm that TSMC had been forging for more than a decade.
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