TSMC and the Geopolitics of the Chip Industry with Tim Culpan

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, produces a significant portion of the global supply of advanced semiconductors. Its cutting-edge technology powers everything from smartphones to high-performance computing, and its customers include Apple, NVIDIA, and ARM.

TSMC’s dominance in chip production has made Taiwan a critical player in the global tech supply chain, drawing attention from major economies like the U.S. and China. This has escalated geopolitical tensions, with concerns over the stability of Taiwan and the potential risks to global tech industries if chip production were disrupted due to regional conflicts.

Tim Culpan is an independent technology journalist and author of the forthcoming book “The World’s Smallest Superpower — inside the rise of TSMC, Foxconn and a nation of Taiwan technology titans.”

He’s based in Taipei and has been covering the semiconductor and electronics hardware industry for 25 years, including 18 years as a journalist and Columnist at Bloomberg. Most recently his work can be found at timculpan.substack.com.

Tim has written extensively about TSMC, and recently broke news on the developments at TSMC’s Arizona factory. He joins us today to discuss what’s happening at TSMC and what that means for the US, Taiwan and China’s chip industries.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from information visualization to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is Head of Marketing and Developer Relations at Skyflow and host of the podcast Partially Redacted, a podcast about privacy and security engineering. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer.