Savary strongly believed that worldwide commerce can be the antidote to battle. People can’t conduct polyglot commerce throughout borders with out cultivating an understanding of overseas legal guidelines, customs, and cultures. Savary additionally believed the Earth’s assets and the fellowship created by commerce had been God-given. “It’s not God’s will that every one human requirements be present in the identical place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Windfall has dispersed its presents in order that people will commerce collectively and discover that their mutual want to assist one another establishes ties of friendship amongst them.”
TSMC’s success is constructed on its singular comprehension of this dispersion of providential presents. The agency is merrily often known as “pure play,” that means all it does is produce bespoke chips for buyer firms. These embody fabless semiconductor companies like Marvell, AMD, MediaTek, and Broadcom, and fabless consumer-electronics companies like Apple and Nvidia. In flip, TSMC depends on the presents of different international locations. Firms like Sumco, in Japan, course of polycrystalline silicon sand, which is quarried for the world’s semiconductor firms in locations like Brazil, France, and the Appalachian Mountains within the US, to develop scorching single-crystal silicon ingots. With diamond wire saws, Sumco’s machines slice shimmering wafers that, polished so clean they really feel like nothing underneath a fingertip, are the flattest objects on the planet. From these wafers, that are as much as a foot in diameter, TSMC’s automated machines, lots of that are constructed by the Dutch photolithography agency ASML, etch billions of transistors onto every chip-sized portion; the largest wafers yield a whole bunch of chips. Every transistor is about 1,000 occasions smaller than is seen to the bare eye.
I’ve thus come to see TSMC as each futuristic and a touching throwback: a tribute to Savary’s largely expired romance during which liberal democracy, worldwide commerce, and progress in science and artwork are of a chunk, each healthful and unstoppable. Extra virtually, nevertheless, the corporate, with its close to monopoly on the most effective chips, serves because the umbo of the area’s so-called Silicon Defend, which is maybe the sturdiest artifact of Twentieth-century realpolitik. For an imperial energy to grab TSMC, the logic goes, can be to slay the world’s goldenest goose.
Like a dutiful valet who exists solely to make his aristocrat look good, TSMC provides the brains of assorted merchandise however by no means claims credit score. The fabs function offstage and underneath an invisibility cloak, silently interceding between the flashy product designers and the even flashier makers and entrepreneurs. TSMC appears to relish the thriller, however anybody within the enterprise understands that, had been TSMC chips to fade from this earth, each new iPad, iPhone, and Mac can be immediately bricked. TSMC’s simultaneous invisibility and indispensability to the human race is one thing that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, likes to joke about. “Principally, there’s air—and TSMC,” he mentioned at Stanford in 2014.
“They name Taiwan the porcupine, proper? It’s like, simply attempt to assault. It’s possible you’ll simply blow the entire island up, however it is going to be ineffective to you,” Keith Krach, a former US State Division undersecretary, informed me a couple of weeks earlier than I left for Taiwan. TSMC’s chairman and former CEO, Mark Liu, has put it extra concretely: “No person can management TSMC by power. In case you take by navy power, or invasion, you’ll render TSMC inoperative.” If a totalitarian regime forcibly occupied TSMC, in different phrases, its kaiser would by no means get its companion democracies on the telephone. The related materials suppliers, chip designers, software program engineers, 5G networks, augmented-reality providers, artificial-intelligence operators, and product producers would block their calls. The fabs themselves can be bricked.
