TSMC: The Invisible Monopoly Behind 90% of Top Chips

One company you've probably never heard of makes around 90% of the world's most advanced chips. The brain of your iPhone, the processors behind today's AI, the chips inside Nvidia's hardware: almost all of them come out of factories on a single island, barely 130 km from mainland China. This is the story of TSMC: how a 55-year-old engineer who was passed over at Texas Instruments bet everything on an idea the industry called insane, how a $200 million machine from a small Dutch town decided the race to the atom, how Intel lost the iPhone, and why the "Silicon Shield" makes Taiwan the most important island on Earth. 🔔 Subscribe to Paper Empires for a new business story every week:    / @paperempires542   Chapters: 0:00 The Invisible Monopoly 1:30 The 55-Year-Old Dropout 3:18 The Pure-Play Gamble 4:57 The Shrinking Race & The EUV Miracle 7:38 The Silicon Shield 9:32 Can Anyone Break The Monopoly? Sources: Bloomberg Economics (Taiwan conflict scenario estimate), TSMC annual results, CHIPS and Science Act (US Congress) Music: original, made for Paper Empires. #PaperEmpires #TSMC #TechGiants