David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It’s so interesting because it really does raise this question of value chain when we talked about the five-part value chain that exists today for making chips. It’s interesting because you could say, well, it belongs wherever Intel belonged circa 2000. Or you could say, well, the set of products that TSMC manufacturers have is 100x the scale that Intel in circa 2000 had. If you think about it, all this stuff that everyone’s all excited about, every time someone talks about the next wave of computing, they’re machine learning, they’re crypto, or they’re 5G. Anything they tell you is something TSMC makes that enables it all. When Marc Andreessen says the software is eating the world, it’s only eating the world because TSMC has made it so freaking cheap to manufacture silicon. Then you can run whatever you want on that silicon. It’s the cost of compute asymptotically approaches zero because TSMC, TSMC, TSMC. How much do we ascribe to them versus ASML? How much do we ascribe to them versus the entire landscape of talented chip designers out there including the 600 chip designers at Apple working on the Apple silicon? It’s hard to disambiguate that. Where does it belong? It’s probably the most successful and important B2B hardware company of all time. I think we can safely say, at this point, it surpasses Intel. Gosh, that’s a big statement to say. Intel, Silicon Valley, the Traitorous Eight, like all of it, Moore’s Law. But in compounding, all the value shows up at the end. It is true that the value that TSMC will create in the world over the next year, two years, three years is probably more than the entire silicon industry leading up to this point combined.…

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