TSMC

“I know a lot of people's PMs are like, oh, you can't invest in TSMC because geopolitical risk, and it's like, no, dude, you can't invest in fucking Apple.”

“Sincerely, they may spend a hundred billion dollars on capex in twenty-twenty-eight, and people, like, just can't fathom that”

“The reality is like if a company like Nvidia or AMD were to ever really, really use one of these other foundries, that foundry would get better really quickly.”

“And the following day, I get an email from TSMC saying, Gavin, I want to work with Etched. Find a way to make it happen.”

“It is why they're the number one and why they're going to win.”

“TSMC customer service is way, way better than I have seen at any other company in any other industry. It's the kind of thing where if you say, hey, you can approve your yield by making this change, you can go make them a recommendation, and then we'll go run a…”

“With software companies, You know, aside from, like, building on AWS or whatever, you pretty much own your whole stack, and so you're really fully in control of your destiny in that way. With hardware companies, you don't. Like, there's an entire supply chain,…”

“TSMC, Decreased their rate of growth in twenty-twenty-three and twenty-twenty-four and twenty-twenty-five. So, like, we're, our shortage of compute is going to get worse in the next few years.”

“The way to solve the geopolitical problem of Dependence on TSMC is to come up with a compute use case that is so massive that everyone is economically incentivized to bring other people up to speed. And then we get the sort of geopolitical insurance for free.”

“The scarcity is what ultimately saved Intel. And I expect at some point in the year that they're going to announce like some major partner for the first time. It's going to be a big deal, but it was ultimately TSMC brought it on themselves.”

“If we snap our fingers and double all those things, you might fix a TSMC bottleneck that they're, you're just gonna run into another bottleneck. You make 20% more chips, then you have another bottleneck immediately.”

“And my contrarian take is that it wouldn't be that bad. Supply would take a shock for sure, but The best processes that we have in the West, like Intel, not that far behind, at worst, like maybe two X worst performance per watt. And the gap is just far smaller…”

“If you look at TSMC five nanometer versus four versus three versus two, the performance per watt on these chips doesn't change like a dramatic amount.”