TSMC, every mention
32 scenes (2023) · ← back to TSMC
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every year 2023 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
Charlie Munger (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 44:46 Ben Gilbert Like, would you hold TSMC at this point?
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 53:49 Ben Gilbert I will say, doing these episodes, this TSMC, it really does bring back the thrill of being in a CS lecture and being like, oh, that's how that works.
- ▶ 59:16 Ben Gilbert There's this amazing video that we'll link to on the Asianometry YouTube channel that we link to also on the TSMC episode, but the constraint today is actually in how much high-performance memory is available on the chip.
- ▶ 1:00:13 Ben Gilbert Due to a quirk of the extreme ultraviolet photolithography that we talked about, the EUV on the TSMC episode, chips are already the full size of the reticle.
- ▶ 1:06:05 David Rosenthal Up until NVIDIA's current GPU generation, the hopper generation of GPUs for the data center, there was only one GPU architecture at NVIDIA, and that same architecture and those same chips from the same wafers made at TSMC, some of them…
- ▶ 1:07:57 David Rosenthal This is the absolute bleeding edge technology that is coming out of TSMC.
- ▶ 1:08:04 David Rosenthal And by NVIDIA bifurcating their chip architectures into a gaming segment that does not have this latest COWAS technology, this allows them to monopolize, like, a huge amount of TSMC's capacity to make the COWAS chips, specifically for…
- ▶ 1:08:33 Ben Gilbert Well, it's literally a TSMC capacity problem.
- ▶ 1:09:04 Ben Gilbert Anyway, the 2.5 D chip packaging technology from TSMC is where you take multiple active silicon dies, like the logic chips and the stack of high bandwidth memory, and they stack them on one piece of silicon.
- ▶ 1:09:43 Ben Gilbert So COOS represents right now about 10 to 15% of TSMC's capacities, and many of the facilities are custom-built for exactly these types of chips that they're producing.
- ▶ 1:09:57 Ben Gilbert There's a pretty good chance that they've already reserved some large part of the 10 to 15% of TSMC's total footprint, and TSMC needs to, like, go make more fabs in order for NVIDIA to have access to more COOS-capable capacity.
- ▶ 1:10:13 David Rosenthal Which, as we know, it takes years for TSMC to do this.
- ▶ 1:28:42 Ben Gilbert But part of it was they also put in a ton of pre-orders for capacity with TSMC that then they thought they weren't going to need, so they had to write down.
- ▶ 1:58:28 Ben Gilbert Sure, ostensibly there's Nvidia versus AMD, but like, AMD doesn't have all this capacity reserved from TSMC, at least not for the 2.5 D packaging process for the high end GPUs.
- ▶ 2:08:29 Ben Gilbert But there's only one TSMC, and there's only so many fabs that they have that can do the, what do they call it, the 2.5 D architecture, so.
- ▶ 2:08:44 Ben Gilbert Nvidia has access to a huge amount of capacity at TSMC that none of their competitors can get their hands on.
- ▶ 2:09:00 Ben Gilbert AMD does have a ton of capacity, it's worth saying, at TSMC for their other products, data center CPUs, which they've actually been doing very well in.
- ▶ 2:09:09 Ben Gilbert But NVIDIA did end up with this wide open lane all to themselves on co-op's capacity at TSMC, and they gotta make the most of that for as long as they have it.
- ▶ 2:09:19 David Rosenthal And I guess to say a little more, though, it's not like this is not a commodity, as we talked about on our TSMC episode.
- ▶ 2:09:27 David Rosenthal Although TSMC is a contract manufacturer, it is the opposite of a commodity, especially at the highest end leading edge.
- ▶ 2:42:53 Ben Gilbert TSMC, in their last earnings, said that AI hardware currently only represents six percent of their revenue, but all indications over there is that they expect AI revenue to grow 50% per year for the next five years.
- ▶ 2:43:26 Ben Gilbert So, it's expensive for TSMC to be wrong.
- ▶ 2:45:00 Ben Gilbert Alright, well, just like our TSMC episode, I wanted to end and leave you with a thought, David, of what it would take to compete with NVIDIA.
- ▶ 2:45:08 Ben Gilbert Because my big takeaway from the TSMC episode was like, wow, that's a lot of things you'd have to believe about a government putting billions of dollars in and hiring all this talent.
- ▶ 2:46:19 Ben Gilbert And even if you got the customer demand, you'd need to contract with TSMC to get the manufacturing capability of their newest cutting-edge fabs to do this two-point-five D COOS lithography and packaging, which there, of course, isn't any…
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 42:42 David Rosenthal Morris Chang, of course, being the founder and CEO of TSMC, who was booted out of Texas Instruments at age 56, I think.
- ▶ 42:50 David Rosenthal And then would go on to start TSMC.
- ▶ 1:11:34 David Rosenthal I mean, literally, it's like the TSMC story.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:33:03 Ben Gilbert On the note of not a shoe company, there's a great analogy here to TSMC.
- ▶ 3:33:30 Ben Gilbert And unlike TSMC, semiconductor manufacturing is wildly differentiated.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 10:41 Ben Gilbert So we, uh, have recently realized that Acquired is the canonical episode, uh, uh, NVIDIA episode, or TSMC, or Taylor Swift.
Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:21:36 Ben Gilbert It's like Morris Chang and TSMC.