← Glossary Company
TSMC
The Taiwanese contract chipmaker that physically manufactures most advanced AI chips, including Nvidia's.
TSMC does not design chips, it builds them. Companies like Nvidia, Apple, AMD and increasingly the AI labs themselves send their designs to TSMC, which turns them into actual silicon. That kind of factory is called a foundry.
Its importance is hard to overstate: almost every leading AI chip in the world is made in TSMC’s plants, and its most advanced production lines are booked out years ahead. When you read that a chip is made on a 5-nanometre or 3-nanometre process, that is a TSMC production line being described.
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