Morris Chang bet chipmaking's whole model on being no one's competitor
In 1987, he founded a company in Taiwan that made nothing — and became the most strategically important manufacturer on earth.
Before Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in 1987, the chip industry was vertically integrated. Companies that designed processors also built them. That meant every company with a chip design was a competitor to every other company that made chips.
Chang's insight — developed during his years at Texas Instruments and Semiconductor Innovation — was that this arrangement was inefficient and that most companies would prefer to separate the design from the fabrication. He proposed a company that would make chips exclusively for other companies, never competing with its own customers.
This model was new enough to be considered eccentric. The company it produced, TSMC, now controls roughly 70 percent of global semiconductor contract manufacturing. Nearly every advanced chip in every smartphone, data center, and military system passes through its facilities in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Chris Miller, author of Chip War, describes TSMC as the world's most strategically critical manufacturer — a single point of concentration in global supply chains that no government had explicitly planned for and that no government knows how to replicate in less than a decade.
Chang retired in 2018 after 31 years leading the company he created. The business model he invented was not a breakthrough in physics or chemistry. It was a rearrangement of relationships — a bet that the value in the industry was in the doing, not the designing, and that a company willing to serve everyone could eventually become indispensable to all.