TSMC

Where the book uses it

• Chapter 5 — The Island in Every Machine

  Why every accelerator runs through Taiwan: the foundry, the packaging and the memory that are booked years ahead, and what that does to anyone arriving late with cash.

Where the record uses it

• Scorecard indicator CoWoS
• Person Wei, C.C

Also discussed in

• Dated test Chapter 5, the concentration half

Sources that use it

• Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (Scribner, 2022) (the choke-point arithmetic Miller printed in 2022, on 2019 data: Taiwan 37 percent of what he called the world’s new computing power, a share of logic wafer capacity in the report his note cites; two Korean firms 44 percent of memory; ASML 100 percent of EUV lithography — “OPEC’s 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison”; an advanced logic fab “costs twice as much as an aircraft carrier but will only be cutting-edge for a couple of years”; the foreign-direct-product rule against Huawei, which Miller dates to May 2020 though its reach to any chip sold to Huawei is the rule of August 2020 — any chip made anywhere with US technology requires US permission; a former senior official afterward: “Weaponized interdependence… It’s a beautiful thing”; TSMC founded 1987 with the state providing 48 percent of the capital — “a project of the Taiwanese state”; on EUV: “wasn’t globalized, it was monopolized” (ch. 32, “Lithography Wars”, its last paragraph); on the industry’s paradox, a U.S. semiconductor executive to a White House official: “Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor” (ch. 49, Everything We’re Competing On); Introduction, of the choke points: “No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms”). Also ch. “The Next Offset”: “One Chinese study has estimated that as many as 95 percent of GPUs in Chinese servers running artificial intelligence workloads are designed by Nvidia” — a cited study’s figure, which the study itself (CAICT, 2021, p. 15) gives as about 95 percent of China’s AI-server market in 2020, a market share and a central figure, not an upper bound, not Miller’s own count (the “in the car with us” line is Matt Turpin’s argument as Miller reports it; the 95 percent figure is a Chinese study Miller cites; Miller’s endnote dates the 37 percent to 2019 Semiconductor Industry Association data and sources the 44 percent to the same report). In the Sources
• Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (Portfolio, 2025) (Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro of August 2023, its release timed to Commerce Secretary Raimondo’s Beijing visit, the state outlet’s gloating which Fishman quotes in an English that is not the outlet’s own, built with older ASML machines, pirated American software and hoarded parts, slower and costlier than TSMC’s process, the state covering any losses; Fishman on who chose the day: “To drive home the point, a top CCP official prevailed upon Huawei to move up the release date of the Mate 60 Pro to coincide with a trip to Beijing by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who oversaw American export controls”; the foreign-direct-product rule as “a little-known 1959 policy” that Commerce officials and the chip industry’s own lobbyists moved to dust off and turn on Huawei — “you can sell to Huawei or you can buy U.S. technology, but you can’t do both”; Attorney General Barr in the May 2020 Situation Room meeting, on the FBI’s conclusion that Huawei equipment in cell towers in the American Midwest, near sensitive military installations — Fishman’s wording, the missile-field specificity being CNN’s July 2022 report — “could intercept and even disrupt communications related to U.S. nuclear weapons”, Fishman’s next sentence adding, as a possibility, that “It was possible that in a crisis, Beijing would be able to use this Huawei equipment as a kill switch to stifle the United States’ command and control over its nuclear arsenal”, and Barr arguing, in words Fishman sets in that meeting which are from his public keynote of 6 February 2020 at the Justice Department’s China Initiative conference, where he said “The power the United States has today to use economic sanctions would pale by comparison to the unprecedented economic leverage we would be surrendering into the hands of China”, as Chokepoints’ own note to page 290 cites, that America’s sanctions power “would pale by comparison to the unprecedented economic leverage we would be surrendering into the hands of China”; within weeks of the October 2022 controls Chinese customs caught a woman smuggling chips in a fake pregnancy bump as companies stockpiled and a black market bloomed; Dan Wang’s “A Death Sentence for Huawei” — the company “is probably finished as a maker of 5G network equipment and smartphones once its inventories run out early next year” — and Huawei’s revenue falling almost 30 percent in the first half of 2021; on the cost: the Chinese government “happy to cover any losses” (ch. 67, Breaking the Chokepoints)). In the Sources
• Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip (Viking, 2025; on the Nobu dinner, p. 194: “In late 2023, Huang met with Elon Musk and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison for sushi at the Nobu restaurant in Palo Alto. Ellison and Musk had a collective net worth above $300 billion”) (Larry Ellison on a meal with Musk and Huang at the Nobu restaurant in Palo Alto in late 2023: “Elon and I were begging, I guess is the best way to describe it. An hour of sushi and begging”; a Caltech data-center administrator’s H100 delivery wait of “almost eighteen months” in early 2024, the professors unwilling to switch, “They’d rather wait for the hardware than switch away from CUDA”, ch. 16, p. 185; Witt’s per-chip power ladder for chips “in standard configurations”, p. 207 — A100 250 W, H100 350 W, B100 700 W, B200 1,000 W; the 2016 DGX box drew as much power as a clothes dryer and its 2024 successor enough for a single-family home, p. 207, the boxes “modular units that customers stacked into the long ‘superpods’” of the data center; a former US military official on seizing TSMC’s fabs — “These machines are insanely precise, and insanely fragile, down to a precision of one atom. What do you think’s going to happen to that machine if a missile goes off next to it?”, remote disabling, “I would say the Taiwanese engineer sabotage thing is not to be underestimated”; Deb Shoquist, who ran NVIDIA’s logistics, on what would happen in a war — orders transferred to Samsung and other partners, and “What would happen is everybody’s products would get dumbed down a click”; Morris Chang telling Nancy Pelosi in 2022 the US fab projects were “doomed to fail” and calling TSMC’s concentration Taiwan’s “silicon shield”, and his argument that “no national economy would suffer as much as China’s if TSMC went offline”, p. 218; “the problem that investors had once faced valuing Nvidia alone now applied to valuing the entire stock market”, p. 209, the last page of ch. 19; ch. 20, pp. 210–212: “Huang now had fifty-five” direct reports and “no designated successor”, p. 211, after the earnings of 21–22 February 2024; “a giant, GDP-sized bet on the capabilities of this single sixty-one-year-old man”, p. 212; on NVIDIA’s planning for Taiwan: Shoquist, “If something happens to Taiwan and TSMC, the ramifications are so large it’s almost like asking me what I’d do if California fell into the ocean”, and Huang, “I don’t want her spending one brain cell on trying to mitigate that, because it’s impossible for her to do so” (p. 217); on Morris Chang to TSMC employees at a TSMC function in late 2023: “in the semiconductor space, there is no globalization anymore. The priority is national security only” (p. 217, two quoted sentences either side of Witt’s attribution)). In the Sources
• AMD, Instinct MI455X specifications and Helios launch, 23 July 2026 (TSMC 2 nm/3 nm chiplets; 432 GB HBM4). In the Sources
• European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, “Who we are” (the joint venture of TSMC, Bosch, Infineon and NXP to establish a fab in Dresden, Saxony; the capacity, process and schedule figures are in TSMC’s release of 8 August 2023). In the Sources

And 64 more: search the Sources.

Related terms

• Accelerator
• Frontier
• Advanced packaging
• CoWoS
• Cut-out
• Foundry
• Island, the
• TPU
• AI factory
• Booked, allocated, rationed
• CHIPS Act
• Convertible