Morris Chang

Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and, with it, invented the business model on which the modern chip industry runs. Born in Ningbo in 1931, his childhood was spent moving to escape war — Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Chongqing — and he reached the United States in 1949. He studied at Harvard and then MIT, taking degrees in mechanical engineering, and failed the doctoral qualifying examination twice, which he has described as the luckiest setback of his life. He joined Texas Instruments in 1958, took a doctorate at Stanford, and rose to run its worldwide semiconductor business, becoming one of the most senior Chinese-born executives in American industry. He was recruited by the Taiwanese government in 1985 to head the Industrial Technology Research Institute, and in 1987, at fifty-five, founded TSMC. The idea was the pure-play foundry. Until then chip companies designed and manufactured their own products, so fabrication capacity was owned by firms that were also competitors, and a designer without a factory could not build. TSMC would manufacture only, never designing chips of its own, and would therefore never compete with its customers. That guarantee made it safe for fabless companies to exist, and Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, AMD and Apple's silicon all depend on it. Capital costs then did the rest: as leading-edge fabs came to cost tens of billions, concentration became inevitable, and TSMC now makes the large majority of the world's most advanced chips. That concentration on one island is the central fact of current technology geopolitics, sometimes called the silicon shield. He retired in 2018 and returned as a public advocate.

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