Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the world's largest contract semiconductor manufacturer, founded in 1987 and headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan. TSMC manufactures chips for fabless semiconductor companies that design silicon but do not operate their own fabrication facilities — a list that includes NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, and essentially every fabless semiconductor company at the leading edge.
TSMC's market position is one of the most strategically consequential facts in modern technology. Approximately 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips (sub-5nm process nodes) are manufactured at TSMC facilities, and approximately 80 percent of those are in Taiwan. This concentration has produced sustained geopolitical concern, particularly around China-Taiwan tensions and US efforts to onshore advanced semiconductor manufacturing through the CHIPS Act.
For AI infrastructure specifically, NVIDIA's H100, H200, and B200 GPUs are all manufactured at TSMC, and NVIDIA's access to TSMC fabrication capacity is a structural input to the AI capacity constraints that shaped the 2023-2026 market.