TSMC, every mention
68 scenes (2022) · ← back to TSMC
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2022 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
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 11:51 Ben Gilbert I had wanted to read Made in Japan, because I'd heard it was amazing, but as I looked back at, like, trademark acquired episodes, TSMC, the New York Times, like, I just didn't think it would be one of those, and it very clearly, especially…
- ▶ 22:26 Ben Gilbert It's first TSMC, but Nvidia is, the thing that's the most interesting about the Nvidia story, I think, is Jensen bet the company three separate times, and truly bet the company, like, if this initiative fails, it will go to zero, and it…
- ▶ 1:25:32 Ben Gilbert I don't know, you could make that argument for a lot of them, like TSMC.
- ▶ 1:54:01 Ben Gilbert I mean, recently they've, obviously, a quarter of Berkshires or something is Apple, and then, uh, recently invested in TSMC, which was fascinating.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:37:13 Ben Gilbert All right, second one, rather than going with another big American tech company, I want to go with one that's an acquired fan favorite and one that's very close to home for you, TSMC.
- ▶ 1:37:23 Ben Gilbert Any change to what TSMC is doing now if you became CEO tomorrow?
- ▶ 1:37:36 Ben Thompson I think probably doing what they're doing.
- ▶ 1:37:39 Ben Thompson I've heard a ton about them and where they are, and
- ▶ 1:37:45 Ben Thompson They were pretty slow to raise prices, even in the face of shortages.
- ▶ 1:37:49 Ben Thompson They've been much more aggressive about that over the last little bit, which seems reasonable to me.
- ▶ 1:38:00 Ben Thompson I think they're probably blessed by the weakness of their competition, but the long-term risk is obviously number one, just the geopolitical risk.
- ▶ 1:38:08 Ben Thompson The reality is, is TSMC
- ▶ 1:38:10 Ben Thompson A core to their model, essential to the model of being so flexible, being so adaptive of incorporating new equipment of accommodating hundreds and hundreds or thousands of customers is all their engineering's in one place.
- ▶ 1:38:27 Ben Thompson And from TSMC's perspective, I think that's just a reality.
- ▶ 1:38:33 Ben Thompson If anything, yes, they're building these fabs in the US, I think, largely for political reasons.
- ▶ 1:39:19 Ben Thompson So obviously I would imagine they're investing heavily in, they've been doing this, like advanced packaging, like multiple chips on the chiplet sort of approach.
- ▶ 1:39:32 Ben Thompson I mean, I actually, one thing I do like about the Japan investment is their trailing edge.
- ▶ 1:40:17 Ben Thompson You know, that's something that would be beneficial, but at the end of the day, TSMC is Taiwan, and that's going to always be the biggest risk, and I'm not sure there's really much they can do about that.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 2:28 David Rosenthal Like, this one is up there with, like, Nvidia, TSMC.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 1:29:19 Jason Calacanis Oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, I actually love Taiwan Semiconductor.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 1:58:25 Ben Gilbert tech companies, TSMC, Toshiba, Intel,
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 1:58:54 Ben Gilbert TSMC.
- ▶ 1:58:56 David Rosenthal Big TSMC customer.
- ▶ 2:24:12 Ben Gilbert Well, it reminded me of TSMC.
- ▶ 2:24:21 Ben Gilbert It made sense for TSMC to proactively lower prices for customers in order to win business.
- ▶ 2:24:34 Ben Gilbert The less obvious part in the TSMC case is that since the cost to build out a new chip fab are so large and so lumpy, like ten billion dollars all at once, it's super advantageous to have that predictability of customer orders.
- ▶ 2:25:20 Ben Gilbert So that proactive price drops works not quite as well as it does for TSMC, but they get rewarded for it for sure.
From NFL to Startup COO to Congressman Regulating Crypto (with Rep. Anthony Gonzalez) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:42:38 David Rosenthal TSMC is, like, pretty freaking important.
- ▶ 1:46:43 Ben Gilbert Well, this is our argument on the TSMC episode, is that only government-scale investment actually could have a prayer of succeeding in creating the next TSMC elsewhere.
- ▶ 1:46:55 David Rosenthal NTSMC was a government seeded, you know, company.
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 1:48:26 Ben Gilbert Which is a very TSMC story.
The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- ▶ 23:08 David Rosenthal And all the great companies, whether it's Apple or Amazon or Nvidia or TSMC, they're all the hero's journey.
- ▶ 37:40 David Rosenthal Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC.
- ▶ 37:51 David Rosenthal And so this is, I think, the other lesson that, um, that I've really taken from acquired, which is that, uh, uh, in this vein, which is that Morris Chang was 56 years old when he founded TSMC, and TSMC is today, I believe, the 11th most…
- ▶ 38:12 Ben Gilbert We should say that it may be the thing keeping geopolitical tensions at rest.
- ▶ 38:18 Ben Gilbert Like it may be the force that nobody wants to destabilize and therefore we have peace.
- ▶ 38:24 Ben Gilbert Like, it's not just a company.
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:19:43 Ben Gilbert And we will never manufacture any of them, but you take one of these two things you license from us, you have someone like TSMC make them.
- ▶ 1:21:40 David Rosenthal I think Hopper is going to be the world's first four nanometer process chip using TSMC's new four nanometer.
- ▶ 1:51:56 David Rosenthal TSMC will work with anybody.
- ▶ 1:51:57 Ben Gilbert In fact, TSMC is working with these new startup billion-dollar funded silicon companies.
- ▶ 1:52:21 Ben Gilbert Nvidia likes to keep the lore alive around TSMC because they've been this, like, great longtime partner and stuff, but they do play manufacturers off each other.
- ▶ 1:59:48 Ben Gilbert TSMC, who makes the chips, has thirty billion.
- ▶ 2:00:02 David Rosenthal Like, TSMC does the fabbing.
- ▶ 2:00:07 Ben Gilbert So here, this is the best graph for you to very clearly see the magic of the fabless business model that Morris Chang was so gracious to invent when he grew TSMC.
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 49:31 Ben Gilbert So we had months ago, after our TSMC episode, a couple of the investors from NZS Capital on, and one of the points that they made is, we actually don't like to hold Apple in our portfolio right now because our view is that they're being…
- ▶ 49:56 Ben Gilbert They are realizing their market leadership, and they are squeezing as much as they possibly can, and you contrast that against a TSMC, which does not charge the very most they possibly can to the customers to manufacture their chips, and…
- ▶ 50:32 Hamilton Helmer Before commenting specifically on TSMC, one of their primary competitive interfaces, obviously, in terms of fab technology and getting ahead in that is Intel, and I just, just a caveat about both those businesses are amazing and…
- ▶ 51:33 Hamilton Helmer And essentially what you're doing is in this case of TSMC, what you've cited is they're sort of giving up current profits for something in the future, right?
- ▶ 53:33 Ben Gilbert Whereas, obviously, now that's the dominant way that we have these three and five nanometer processes and TSMCs to benefit.
- ▶ 54:37 Hamilton Helmer Before TSMC, the companies that crossed that threshold of enough comfort with forward guarantees were the companies that sold the products.
- ▶ 57:49 Hamilton Helmer TSMC is just such an amazing story.
- ▶ 58:45 David Rosenthal They're a vertically integrated company, they control the whole stack, and they're able to fund their also quite large capital expenditures, but they fund that through hardware sales in a very different manner than TSMC.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:11 David Rosenthal You know, TSMC doesn't start till 1987.
- ▶ 45:56 Ben Gilbert Like the TSMC or the Samsung or the Global Foundries or?
- ▶ 46:00 David Rosenthal Now importantly, NVIDIA is not using TSMC at this point because they can't, they can't.
- ▶ 46:05 David Rosenthal TSMC only works with the best and NVIDIA is not the best.
- ▶ 48:45 David Rosenthal I don't know if they're using, um, United or, or one of the, one of the other foundries in Taiwan, not TSMC.
- ▶ 1:01:01 David Rosenthal TSMC that wouldn't even return Jensen's calls back in the day.
- ▶ 1:01:08 David Rosenthal Did you watch the TSMC 30th anniversary?
- ▶ 1:01:16 Ben Gilbert This is how much pull Morris Chang from TSMC has.
- ▶ 1:01:33 Ben Gilbert No, it was basically everyone but AMD of the sort of pillars of the TSMC ecosystem.
- ▶ 1:01:43 David Rosenthal It's like a celebration of Morris and of, of TSMC.
- ▶ 1:01:49 David Rosenthal So in the section with Jensen, uh, they tell the story of how NVIDIA at this point, it's gotta be TSMC's biggest customer.
- ▶ 1:03:00 David Rosenthal This is Morris Chang at TSMC.
- ▶ 1:03:16 Ben Gilbert And that's how TSMC became the manufacturer of NVIDIA chips.
- ▶ 1:03:21 David Rosenthal The next year, the two companies sign a huge multi-year deal for TSMC to become the primary foundry for NVIDIA and still are today.
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 33:33 David Rosenthal Well, like, actually, it turns out the semiconductors are pretty freaking important, and TSMC is, like, you know, a very, very, very important company and one of the top 10 most valuable in the world.