The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 102 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Chang: Tim Cook told me in 2011 that Intel cannot run a foundry
“And anyway, he told me there's nothing to worry about because Intel just does not know how to be a Foundry.”
Morris Chang: Mark Liu declined TSMC BD role due to small headcount
“So, I, ah, first offered the marketing, ah, business development job to the guy who was in the Bigger job, advanced technology, Mark. And I explained to him that I did not think he had had any significant marketing experience in the past, and this would, this …”
Chang: TSMC's 2009 CEO circumvented board approval by framing layoffs as performance dismissals
“So I said to him, if you want to lay off, bring it to the board. I'll call a special board meeting. And I knew what I would ask the board to do, you know, which was not to grant the permission. That's right. But he decided to circumvent that, the CEO, you know…”
Chang: Co-developing tech with senior partners destroys internal R&D capability
“The company that co-developed something with them will send its engineers to IBM, you know. And when we do that, we lose our ability to develop our own process. We'll have to depend on this co-development thing.”
Chang: TSMC matched Intel in technology and beat it in manufacturing in 2011
“Technology. At that time, we thought we were almost at par with Intel. Almost. In fact, I thought we were, I think I thought we were at par with Intel at that time. Manufacturing. I thought we were better than Intel. And customer trust. We thought that our cus…”
Chang: Layoffs based on supervisor performance reviews lack credibility
“People would not respect us if we lay off by performance ratings.
[1196] Ben Gilbert: And why is that?
[1198] Morris Chang: Because it's very subjective. Performance reviews, the performance ratings are done by everyone's own supervisor. So, the 700 was perf…”
Chang: TSMC Offered NVIDIA Over $100M with 48-Hour Deadline
“Yes. More than a hundred million. And I also said, our offer is effective, 48 hours. If you do not, there is not going to be, we are not going to argue, we are not going to bargain. If you don't accept the offer within 48 hours, we will have to go to an arbitr…”
Chang: Previous TSMC CEO Offered NVIDIA Zero Dollars in Dispute
“The previous CEO did not even give him a number, you know. The previous CEO gave him zero.”
Morris Chang: Non-executive chairmen should only intervene if the company risks collapse
“My principle, when I was, ah, The chairman and not the CEO, ah, was, well, sometimes you have to let the CEO make his own mistakes and learn from them, you know. Ah, of course, ah, not if the whole company is going down the drain, drain, so you have to interfe…”
Morris Chang: China heavily subsidized and took control of solar manufacturing
“The solar business could have been pretty good. However, China ruined it. They subsidized the hell out of it. And they now control that business, solar cells.”
Gilbert: $100B fab costs give semiconductor manufacturing natural monopoly characteristics
“Eventually it will cost 40,000,000,080 billion, a hundred billion. How many players are really going to be left standing with the ability to deploy a hundred billion dollars to build a building with some machines in it? This market has natural monopoly charact…”
Chang: 2009 TSMC CEO retake was triggered by 600-700 performance layoffs
“Another problem was the immediate one that triggered me to retake the CO ship because the previous CO had laid off, except he didn't use the term laid off, you know. He used the bad performance review, the worst performance review people, and there were about …”
Morris Chang: Semiconductor foundries are unsuitable for divisional organizational structures
“I really did not think that the foundry business, TSMC's business Was suitable for the divisional structure. Because, you know, we have almost the same group of customers.”
Chang: TSMC rejected IBM co-development deal that UMC accepted and regretted
“So we declined without having to think about it at all. We declined the IBM office. And IBM, in fact, was quite angry, you know. I mean, they thought we're still a small Taiwan backward place, you know. It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM. So…”
TSMC has the strongest economic moat of any company in the world
“Other than that, I don't know that there is a stronger moat that any company has in the entire world than TSMC.”
Gilbert: Only a complete paradigm shift can unseat TSMC
“I think the only thing that will unseat TSMC is a complete paradigm shift.”
TSMC will soon create more value than the entire prior silicon industry
“So it is true that the value that TSMC will create in the world over the next year, two years, three years, is probably more than the entire silicon industry leading up to this point combined.”
Moore's Law and Rock's Law mathematically drive semiconductor foundries toward monopoly
“When you combine these two things, the Moore's Law and Moore's Second Law, it implies that the leading company, that most profitable company, will become a monopoly.”
Thompson: TSMC cannot hedge against Taiwan geopolitical risk
“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. And that. Place is Taiwan and that ha…”
Gilbert: TSMC may be the key force maintaining geopolitical peace
“We should say that it may be the thing keeping geopolitical tensions at rest. Like it may be the force that nobody wants to destabilize and therefore we have peace. Like, it's not just a company.”
Bathgate: A TSMC fab shutdown sets Western tech progress back five years
“If for some reason, you know, China moved to seize Taiwan or however, you know, it went into play and all of a sudden TSMC's fabs were shut down, then you really, the Western world would be, you know, set back at least five years, if not 10, just in terms of l…”
Bathgate: TSMC surpassed Intel because vertical integration forced impossible multi-front technological battles
“Intel has to fight TSMC on process technology, which, like, in itself is one of the hardest things, you know, any technology companies had to do over the last 20 years, and that's why Intel has been surpassed by TSMC, right?”
Morris Chang told Acquired TSMC's solar and memory diversification was a mistake
“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.
Memories, and there was one other thi…”
Chang: Apple placed initial 16nm chip orders with Samsung over TSMC
“I mean, it was a real shock when I heard that Apple had placed their first orders of 16 with Samsung.”
Chang: TSMC board questioned suddenly tripling CapEx for 28nm
“Setting the R&D at eight percent of did not, Invite any opposition from the board, but suddenly increasing capital spending, threefold, I think, did invite a lot of questions from the board.”
Chang: Replaced TSMC CEO kept same pay, grade, and successor status
“Well, as far as the CO is concerned, I didn't keep him. I had More than one nice talk with him. I intended to, and I told him that he was still a potential, ah, successor to me. So I kept him at the same job grade, we have job grades, and the same salary and b…”
Rosenthal: Learning Curve Pricing Requires Early Unprofitable Aggressive Pricing
“The insight is that like the goal that you are playing for is to be the largest volume player kind of at the end of the game. So if you take that as a given of like, if we get to be the largest volume player, this is a fixed cost business. This is a scale econ…”
Chang: Eliminating TSMC's dividend for Apple would have crashed the stock
“About one-third of our investors, shareholders, are very seriously interested in the dividends. So if we do what the Jeff Williams said, oh, a stock is going to drop like hell, you know.”
Chang: TSMC's Scale Exceeded Expectations, But Not by an Order of Magnitude
“TSMC's size and importance exceeded my expectations, but not by an order of magnitude, you know.”
Chang: I did not foresee how big smartphones would become for 28nm
“No, I didn't. Maybe the business development guy, I mean, that was another interesting story. Yeah, maybe he knew. Maybe he, or at least, I now hope and I, of course, hoped at that time, too, that he had a more detailed visibility than I did”
Chang: TSMC funded Apple ramp via debt and filled half their requested volume
“What we first did our financial planning and we decided not to cut dividend. We decided not to sell new stock. We decided to just borrow. And I mean, this was also with consultation with Goldman Sachs, you know, we chose following. How much? I looked at the nu…”
Chang: TSMC fixed R&D spending at 8% of revenue through recessions
“So I almost just literally picked a number out ahead.
We've been running six or seven percent already.
So I said, oh, let's pick eight percent.
Okay.
Yeah.
Eight percent, regardless of
Whether there's a recession or not.
And it's just eight percent of revenue…”
Chang: Apple's initial TSMC pitch proposed a 40% gross margin
“He did say that we will let you have a 40% gross margin, and I think, well, I didn't say anything. I didn't answer him. I didn't respond to that, but our margin at that time was already 45%, and I was trying to put it up to 50%.”
Capital alone cannot bypass decades of semiconductor manufacturing learning curves
“There is no amount of money you could spend to catch up next year. You can't. Because the engineering is so hard, and the learning curve takes decades to get to this point.”
TSMC reduced the capital required to launch a semiconductor startup by 80-90%
“There is a thing that you have to raise 10 to 20% of the capital that you otherwise would have needed to raise if TSMC exists.”
Rosenthal: Tesla Will Have to Shift to TSMC for 3nm Chips
“They're gonna have to go to TSMC, though, in the next generation, because you want three nanometer.”
David Rosenthal: TSMC outspends all competitors on ASML equipment
“It's TSMC's insane capital operating cash flow production that enables them to spend capex above anybody else that allows them to buy more ASML equipment than anyone else.”
Nvidia bifurcated its architecture to monopolize TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity
“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 these H-one hundreds, whi…”
AMD lacks Nvidia's TSMC advanced packaging capacity and CUDA developer ecosystem
“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. AMD doesn't have the developer ecosystem from CUDA.”
TSMC Was a Solution in Search of a Problem Founders Shouldn't Copy
“It's like Morris Chang and TSMC. It's like, he invented the notion of a fabulous semiconductor company before there was any demand for that, and then it turned out that his timing was exactly right, that, like, within a couple of years, a whole ton of, you kno…”
Thompson: EUV lithography has only 5 to 6 years left
“EUV has another five, six years, and then it's not super clear what's after that.”
TSMC Rationally Trades Current Profit Margins to Secure Long-Term Customer Predictability
“That performance frontier is moving in sort of a kind of predictable way, and so being a leader in technology means that you are a cost and performance leader in the business, and so it makes a lot of sense to me to kind of give up current profits to guarantee…”
Bathgate: TSMC keeps margins below its customers to prioritize long-term platform value
“TSMC has lower margins than most of their gross margins than most of their customers. And so at any point they could probably take the margins from 50% to 60% and say, Hey, I'm obviously have a monopoly in this market, but the way, you know, Morris Chang archi…”
Gilbert: Recreating Taiwan's science park ecosystem elsewhere would take decades
“It would take decades to recreate the ecosystem that they have in the science parks.”
Chang: TSMC did not include Apple in 28nm capex expansion
“Because when we figured a very big market for 28 and therefore when we planned to increase vastly our capital spending, we didn't have Apple in mind. We didn't include Apple. Apple came strictly as a present surprise.”
Chang: Committing to 20nm delayed TSMC's 16nm development
“We, our R&D was not strong enough to do two nodes at the same time. Now we are. But back then we weren't. So, the trade-off of accepting the 20 node technology was that we delayed our 16 node Development.”
Rosenthal: TSMC is the only leading-edge foundry not competing with customers
“They are truly the only foundry at the leading edge that does not in any way compete with their customers. They don't have their own end product division, they don't design their own chips, it is truly they only serve their customers, and they do not compete a…”