Crossed Wires: The most important company in the world and the storm brewing around it

If you think China is threatening to invade Taiwan because of its potential geo-military importance or its history or its valuable real estate, forget it. It is because of TSMC. The company sits with its finger in the dyke behind which is a roiling and dangerous sea of geopolitics. 

No, wait. Perhaps the most important company in the world is actually ASML, based in Veldhoven, in the Netherlands. We’ll get to them later.

So what are these companies and why have they become the firing pin of a global hand grenade?

The short answer is that TSMC manufactures the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips. America has no equivalent. China has no equivalent. They stand alone; no competitors come close.

Let’s rewind.

TSMC is a relatively new company. It was started in Taiwan in 1987 by MIT-educated Morris Chang as the world's first “pure play foundry”. This meant that they did not design chips but only manufactured them, and never under their own name (unlike competitors such as Samsung). They were originally at the bottom of the food chain — give us a chip design, they told the world’s tech giants, and we will give you the physical object, perfectly manufactured, no defects, on time and on budget.

I suppose at the time this was to be expected. Taiwan was well respected as a reliable high-volume, high-tech, affordable manufacturer, but not much more than that. Apple and Qualcomm and others were (and still are) happy to hand over their designs to Taiwan for manufacture.

But then TSMC got serious about being the best. They raised billions from shareholders and poured money into research and development. It wasn’t just about automation or bigger plants or smoother supply chains. Their core area of research and development was focused on mastering technologies and processes that would allow them to pack more and more transistors onto a single piece of silicon. 

Semiconductor pioneer

Remember Moore’s Law? It was posited by Gordon Moore, a semiconductor pioneer in the early 1970s. Moore’s Law predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double about every two years. TSMC has been the embodiment of that law, almost as though it was written for them — their North Star.

How large does the company loom today? A total of 25% of Taiwan’s GDP comes from semiconductors, and TSMC dominates the industry. It constitutes 30% of Taiwan’s stock market value. It will exceed $100-billion in revenue and $50-billion in profits this year. It owns 67% of the global foundry market. It manufactures one-third of all the chips in the world. It manufactures more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. In 2023, Wired writer Virginia Heffernan went to Taiwan to report on the company and the headline of her article was “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory”. Perhaps it was only partially hyperbolic.

In short, the company is large, profitable, dominant, defendable — and vital.

And so it happened that all the tech companies handed their chip designs to TSMC for manufacturing. None of them believed that mere manufacturing was “core'” internet protocol. TSMC was seen as a serf, a manufacturing gun for hire.

Yes, well, but… in the last 37 years TSMC has built the biggest, baddest gun in the world. They are used by Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom and even other chip manufacturers. The company has created, in effect, a benign monopoly, gladly providing a completely differentiated and unique and core service to all comers.

How did they attain this vaunted position in the value chain of high tech? By investment in research and development, over and over again, until they built a moat so wide that the competitive expense of crossing it became prohibitive.

Michael Spencer, a widely read tech commentator and blogger, makes the stakes clear in a recent article: “A (Chinese) threat to the island nation of Taiwan (e.g, like a blockade or invasion) and supply chains of TSMC, would immediately plunge the global economy into a severe recession. It would also likely spark a hot war involving the US, Japan and other allies.”

But, as always with politics, the story gets complicated, especially where Trump is involved.

TSMC started to establish joint ventures in other countries (such as Germany) around 2020, well before Trump 2.0. Biden’s Chips Act provided some of the kickstart funding ($11.6-billion) for the establishment of a fab plant in Arizona in 2020. Fast forward to 2025 and the Trump tariffs, and suddenly we have the chairperson of TSMC, CC Wei, at the White House announcing a $100-billion investment in TSMC US.

Good for the US, good for Taiwan, right? Not so fast. It is not at all clear whether TSMC can produce chips at a profit in the US, given the labour costs, red tape, and, after decades of neglect, a significantly thinned-out high-tech manufacturing skills base. And then there is the uber-advanced end of their product line, the so-called 2nm and 3nm nodes, which are the most efficient and densely populated with transistors. The government of Taiwan is putting its foot down — those stay in Taiwan.

Further wrinkle

To add a further wrinkle, we have ASML, a Dutch company, which provides a critical piece of TMSC’s chip manufacturing puzzle (probably the only piece not built by them) — the ultra-violet lithography kit that etches millions of minute corridors into the silicon, the “roadways” for electrons, a necessary step without which the chip cannot be manufactured. ASML is the only company in the world with the know-how to manufacture such a machine. It has taken more than 30 years of development and tens of billions invested. You can’t get the kit anywhere else and, as with TSMC, this makes for a very deep moat.

The US can’t allow Taiwan to be invaded by China in case they choke off the supply of advanced chips to the US and the West more generally. For their part, the Chinese can’t stand helplessly by watching TMSC empower the US with the world’s most advanced chips. This leaves us with one Taiwanese company and one Dutch company standing between two covetous superpowers which both want control over the supply and manufacture of the tiny brains that now power the entire world. Neither can afford to have the other win. And presumably, AMSL simply wants everyone to bugger off so they can sell their admirable kit in peace. 

The standoff is not going to last. It seems likely that China will indeed invade Taiwan — all indicators point in that direction. Let us hope that TSMC’s internet protocol is properly externalised to other countries by the time it happens. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now. His articles can be found on https://substack.com/@stevenboykeysidley

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