TSMC, every mention
470 scenes · ← back to TSMC
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 203David Rosenthal 168John Bathgate 40Morris Chang 27Brinton Johns 13Ben Thompson 12Hamilton Helmer 4Steve Ballmer 2Jason Calacanis 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where TSMC comes up
Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:37:36 Ben Gilbert So think Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, TSMC, Nike.
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:26:02 David Rosenthal As you progress, like TSMC and ASML, they got to spend incrementally more and more capex and more R and D every year to push the boundaries farther and farther.
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:55:04 Ben Gilbert We were sitting down with Morris Chang, and he was talking about TSMC, and he told us that one of the ways that they aired was trying to exit the integrated circuit market, or diversify from that market, and go into solar.
- ▶ 2:46:11 Ben Gilbert Listeners, if you like this episode, go check out our episodes on TSMC, Hermes, Costco, the NFL, Berkshire, or any other episode that we talked about.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:48:15 Ben Gilbert Printed at, I don't know if it was a TSMC, but, you know, fabbed and ready.
- ▶ 3:37:17 Ben Gilbert Google has to still pay some margin to their chip hardware partner, Broadcom, that handles a lot of the work to actually make the chip interface with TSMC.
- ▶ 3:38:13 Ben Gilbert We are pushing the limits of what we can do with chips, the needs of next generation models, how fast TSMC is able to produce.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 1:30:49 Steve Ballmer TSMC.
- ▶ 1:30:52 Steve Ballmer They're one trick pony, very successful.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:16:12 David Rosenthal I mean, I guess Morris Chang and TSMC too, although Morris over time did get quite a significant stake in TSMC through equity grants and Dee, I think got paid quite a bit at Visa too.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 25:03 David Rosenthal If you're a movement maker, you're like TSMC here.
- ▶ 2:48:08 David Rosenthal The analogy here is like TSMC in Taiwan.
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 0:50 Ben Gilbert After becoming obsessed with semiconductors from our TSMC episode four years ago, David and I wound our way through the rest of the industry, studying fabless companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm, architecture companies like ARM,
- ▶ 1:13 Ben Gilbert Morris Chang, the ninety-three-year-old founder of TSMC, if he would be open to an interview with us.
- ▶ 1:39 Ben Gilbert We flew to Taiwan for a forty-eight-hour whirlwind where we spent some time at TSMC's headquarters in Hinshu Science Park, uh, where many of TSMC's fabs are located.
- ▶ 2:05 Ben Gilbert We managed to get our hands on an unpublished translation of the book to prepare, and what you are about to hear focuses on a few crucial stories from TSMC's history that Dr.
- ▶ 3:29 David Rosenthal Could you tell us a little bit in your words about your relationship with Jensen and TSMC's special relationship with NVIDIA?
- ▶ 4:13 Morris Chang It was a small company, but they had developed, uh, some really, uh, promising, uh, chips, but, uh, they were looking for a foundry, and, uh, they had approached the TSMC's, uh, San Jose office, but, uh, they really
- ▶ 4:47 Morris Chang Because NVIDIA really wanted to do business with, uh, PSMC.
- ▶ 5:51 Morris Chang So TSMC, I think at that time already had a few thousand employees and we, we had exceeded, I remember we had exceeded the one billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 95, and this was 97.
- ▶ 6:09 Morris Chang So we were, relatively speaking, we were a pretty big company.
- ▶ 6:14 Ben Gilbert You were yourself
- ▶ 7:58 Morris Chang He told me that NVIDIA was in financial difficulties, but the chip that he wanted now to have found would not only, ah, save the company, it would also, ah, make NVIDIA a major customer of TSMC.
- ▶ 8:28 Morris Chang You know, we were, we're over a billion dollars.
- ▶ 9:13 Morris Chang Not only did it do that, it also started to make them a major customer of TSMC.
- ▶ 9:38 Ben Gilbert TSMC would
- ▶ 9:51 Ben Gilbert And I want to go to this moment in 2009 on the 40 nanometer node where development was slower than TSMC had hoped, and it was costing customers like Nvidia time and money.
- ▶ 11:11 Morris Chang Uh, we, we had the Director of Quality, uh, insisted that, uh, we were not, TSMC was not at fault.
- ▶ 19:16 Morris Chang Our TSMC CO did in late late,, late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late late
- ▶ 21:24 Morris Chang Now, ah, the company, TSMC, was pre-warned that hundreds of people would appear, ah, in front of my home.
- ▶ 21:36 Morris Chang So they notified the police department, ah, in my district.
- ▶ 28:09 Morris Chang TSMC service didn't take off.
- ▶ 31:05 Morris Chang It's for, for TSMC, you know.
- ▶ 36:21 Ben Gilbert In our remastered TSMC episode, you heard how JP Morgan's trade and working capital group helps companies manage risk and access liquidity for their global trade.
- ▶ 38:39 David Rosenthal And as we understand your story and the company's story, 28 nanometers is when TSMC really started to take the leadership role at the leading edge in the industry.
- ▶ 40:18 Morris Chang Now, coming back to TSMC, I wanted to set a, a number
- ▶ 49:15 Ben Gilbert Cause this was effectively betting a huge amount of the company's cash on this node, this process, this generation.
- ▶ 50:34 Morris Chang So at the end, I had to say, well, look, I heard you, but I am still the guy that's responsible for the operation of the company.
- ▶ 54:21 Morris Chang He got a little, I think, he got a little tired of running this company.
- ▶ 55:09 Morris Chang But I really did not think that the foundry business, TSMC's business, uh,
- ▶ 55:54 Ben Gilbert Not to mention TSMC has 21, 22 fabs now, and so what, are you going to have 22 divisions?
- ▶ 1:03:44 Ben Gilbert And your goal was for him to become a well-rounded executive in hopes of leading the company after he sort of did that tour of duty.
- ▶ 1:04:42 David Rosenthal And before this period, you were doing the business development and marketing for the company, right?
- ▶ 1:05:46 David Rosenthal And he's now the chairman and CEO of TSMC.
- ▶ 1:11:25 Morris Chang It must be someone special, ah, for TSMC, you know.
- ▶ 1:14:42 Morris Chang It was an announced effort in the company to push the growth margin, ah, and I had that, ah, effort for many years, ah, after I came back to meet the CEO
- ▶ 1:21:08 Morris Chang You know, remember, you know, I, I planted a lot of seeds in, when I ran TSMC, you know.
- ▶ 1:22:17 Morris Chang It's, in fact, right now the TSMC price, uh, ADR price, uh, is, uh, has a, uh, 20% premium over
- ▶ 1:22:30 Morris Chang However, you know, you need TSMC board permission to convert your shares to ADR.
- ▶ 1:22:56 Morris Chang Ordinary Taiwan TSMC stock to ADRs.
- ▶ 1:28:21 Ben Gilbert TSMC's revenues, uh, it was four years after the dot-com bubble before they were back at the.
- ▶ 1:39:15 Ben Gilbert I mean, this is why you started TSMC as a pure play foundry business, because you didn't want to compete head to head.
- ▶ 1:41:43 David Rosenthal And in fact, TSMC makes all of Apple's chips.
- ▶ 1:45:20 Ben Gilbert And that's for their microprocessor business, but here we're talking about the foundry business, where TSMC at their extreme core does not compete with customers, and even if Intel is trying to do business in good faith,
- ▶ 1:46:53 Ben Gilbert Were there any trade-offs where, ah, did, did pursuing 20 nanometer and spending the billions of dollars cost TSMC in any way?
- ▶ 1:49:06 Ben Gilbert One thing that has occurred to me is, uh, TSMC now gets mid-fifty percent gross margins.
- ▶ 1:49:22 Ben Gilbert TSMC's creating a lot of value.
- ▶ 1:55:06 David Rosenthal At the same time, this also, again, just illustrates the brilliance of, of TSMC and the, the pure play foundry business model.
- ▶ 1:56:29 Morris Chang Ah, actually, before ah, I started the TSMC.
- ▶ 1:56:37 Morris Chang TSMC started in, in,, in in, in, in in in, in, in in in in in,,,, in,,,, in in, in,, in, in
- ▶ 1:59:38 Morris Chang The next step they took was to ask us, TSMC, to co-develop the next generation of technology, which is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .…
- ▶ 2:01:53 Ben Gilbert And UMC at that point in time was, was it fair to call it a peer of TSMC here in Taiwan in terms of volume and size?
- ▶ 2:05:27 Ben Gilbert Who was a director of TSMC at one point, right?
- ▶ 2:11:12 Ben Gilbert I couldn't have told you that TSMC was going to be the winner, but once you internalize the learning curve and globalization, you can sort of into it.
- ▶ 2:14:23 Ben Gilbert and I wanted to ask you is, TSMC is essentially the only trillion dollar company in the world, not on the west coast of the United States.
- ▶ 2:15:06 Morris Chang TSMC's size and importance exceeded my expectations, but not by an order of magnitude, you know.
- ▶ 2:15:57 Ben Gilbert There were so many reasons why the original incarnation of TSMC was kind of a bad business.
- ▶ 2:22:47 David Rosenthal At the time, they didn't have the capabilities, certainly not TSMC, and, and it didn't exist in Taiwan to be able to design chips and products.
- ▶ 2:23:51 David Rosenthal Primarily, I think, was the main reason why TSMC has worked so well.
- ▶ 2:25:42 Ben Gilbert TSMC customers.
- ▶ 2:25:44 Ben Gilbert It's like, well, there is AMD that designs x-eighty-six chips that TSMC manufacturers, but that's not like the common case of the way it would have gone for an, in an x-eighty-six dominated world.
- ▶ 2:27:18 Ben Gilbert Yes, and ARM and TSMC are sort of, like, coupled at the hip of history, uh, of when this, how this came to be.
- ▶ 2:27:36 David Rosenthal Not only TSMC, ARM, Synopsys, Cadence, and ASML all founded,
- ▶ 2:27:48 David Rosenthal We talked about this on our original TSMC episode that, you know, even if you wanted to, you couldn't airlift TSMC and this capability out of Taiwan and recreate it somewhere else.
- ▶ 2:28:27 David Rosenthal It's not just TSMC that's there.
- ▶ 2:29:09 Ben Gilbert This ecosystem is with each other that, you know, Synopsys has to be closely, uh, tied with TSMC to understand what the next node will look like so that they can make it easy for people who are using Synopsys, uh, tools to design ships to,…
- ▶ 2:30:14 Ben Gilbert You know, why is TSMC doing it?
- ▶ 2:33:44 David Rosenthal This is a major difference in Intel's fab strategy versus TSMC.
- ▶ 2:34:38 David Rosenthal So this is the business that TSMC started in.
- ▶ 2:34:47 Ben Gilbert So, fab one belonged to ITRI, the, the government, uh, where Morris was president of that organization before taking the, the helmet TSMC.
- ▶ 2:34:57 Ben Gilbert Uh, fabs two and three were the first TSMC specific fabs that they built, and they're still running from the late eighties.
- ▶ 2:35:43 Ben Gilbert Of TSMC's older fabs, which, by the way, on an accounting basis, are fully depreciated.
- ▶ 2:36:20 Ben Gilbert Just not what TSMC does.
- ▶ 2:36:41 Ben Gilbert But, uh, I think he even said to Jensen, uh, in the first few years of TSMC, growth wasn't very high because we were waiting for the customers to emerge.
- ▶ 2:41:33 Ben Gilbert The story of TSMC goes from one where it's surprising and unlikely and it becomes an inevitability.
- ▶ 2:45:49 Ben Gilbert Since TSMC was founded in 1987, the world's semiconductor market has grown from twenty six billion to five hundred and twenty seven billion last year.
- ▶ 2:46:00 Ben Gilbert They wrote a ridiculous tailwind.
- ▶ 2:46:19 Ben Gilbert I keep thinking about the fact that they can go spend twenty billion dollars to build a building.
- ▶ 2:46:25 Ben Gilbert And the stuff that they spit out is so valuable that that twenty billion was a profitable investment in a matter of, I don't know how many years, if it's three, five, seven, whatever the payback period is.
- ▶ 2:46:36 Ben Gilbert Like, they know for sure that it's a worthwhile investment to do that.
- ▶ 2:51:04 Ben Gilbert Great conversation with Sir Peter Bonfield, a current TSMC board member and former CEO of British Telecom.
- ▶ 2:52:45 Ben Gilbert He did a great, great write-up on TSMC that he'll be posting publicly, um, right before we post this episode, so you all can see it.
- ▶ 2:52:53 Ben Gilbert It was great last-minute prep for me after reading the memoir to get someone else's take on what makes this company so special, and actually some of the stats that we threw out in
- ▶ 2:53:04 Ben Gilbert So if you want a more and kind of a more analytical view of how did TSMC become TSMC, uh, he's got a great study on that that we'll link to in the show notes.
- ▶ 2:53:53 Ben Gilbert Or of course, if you did not last week, listen to the TSMC remastered episode.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 0:03 Ben Gilbert We regularly get feedback that this episode on TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is one of the best acquired episodes ever.
- ▶ 0:28 Ben Gilbert Since then, semiconductors have become so much more important in our world, and TSMC has essentially become the only manufacturer of the leading edge chips.
- ▶ 0:39 Ben Gilbert They make the primary chip inside every MacBook and iPhone shipped today.
- ▶ 0:43 Ben Gilbert They're powering the AI wave, manufacturing all of NVIDIA's chips.
- ▶ 0:47 Ben Gilbert They make the chips for a whole bunch of other fabless companies like Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers like AWS.
page 1 of 5 · 100 scenes per page · newest episode first next →