He Started TSMC at 55 — Now Apple & Nvidia Depend on It

At 52 years old, Morris Chang believed his path to the top of the semiconductor industry was effectively over. After spending 25 years at Texas Instruments, he left the company and eventually moved to Taiwan. Then, at 55, he helped create TSMC. What followed would change the technology industry forever. Instead of designing its own chips, TSMC built a radically different business model: manufacture chips for other companies — and never compete with them. That decision helped enable the rise of the fabless semiconductor industry and eventually made TSMC indispensable to companies such as Nvidia and Apple. Today, TSMC sits at the center of the global AI boom and advanced semiconductor manufacturing. In its latest quarterly results, the company reported approximately $46.7 billion in revenue and around $23.6 billion in net profit — another record quarter driven by massive demand for advanced chips and artificial intelligence infrastructure. In this episode of BreachFrame, we tell the story of Morris Chang: from war-torn China and a failed academic dream, to Texas Instruments, Taiwan, the creation of TSMC, and the business model that quietly transformed the modern technology industry. This isn’t just the story of one company. It’s the story of how a 55-year-old executive built one of the most important technology empires in the world. Subscribe to BreachFrame for deeply researched documentaries about the people, decisions and companies that build global empires — and break them.