Chris Miller

Morris Chang: the microchip mogul caught between Biden and Xi

At the centre of the world’s tech sector sits a Taiwanese chip tycoon most people have never heard of. Morris Chang is the founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest chipmaker. He became rich and powerful by making chips the rest of the world can’t live without. And as the world’s semiconductor industry is being reshaped by Chinese and US efforts to control the future of chip technology, Chang finds himself courted by the world’s most powerful governments but also under pressure amid an escalating geopolitical clash.

The tale of Morris Chang is not only a story of visionary entrepreneurialism and technical brilliance

Though TSMC is far from a household name, almost everyone uses its chips each day. It is hard to find a smartphone, data centre, or cell-phone tower without at least one TSMC-manufactured chip inside. The ubiquity of TSMC’s products have made it one of the world’s most valuable companies, overtaking the market capitalisation of older US tech firms like Intel or Chinese giants like Alibaba. In total, the company manufactures 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced processor chips.

This has made Chang one of the world’s most important tech tycoons. Yet he is also the most underestimated. The 91-year-old pipe smoker doesn’t fit the image of a hoodie-wearing Silicon Valley tech bro. Yet his company has sold more products than Steve Jobs’s Apple, and its reach is far more global than Jack Ma’s Alibaba. But, until recently, Chang’s name was scarcely known.

The tale of Morris Chang is not only a story of visionary entrepreneurialism and technical brilliance. Chang’s unique life, spanning China, the US and Taiwan, also illustrates the complexities caused by the widening chasms in the world’s tech ecosystem, as Washington tries to halt the flow of its most advanced technologies to the Chinese military, and Beijing spends billions in a desperate effort to catch up.

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