TSMC and the Geopolitics of the Chip Industry with Tim Culpan
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
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.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Sponsors
Introducing Height: the only autonomous project management tool. Backlog grooming, bug triage, keeping documentation up-to-date—those aren’t why you got into this job, right? Well, Height handles all that grunt work for you.
Using a first-of-its-kind AI approach, Height offloads time-consuming workflows, without you lifting a finger. It syncs your specs to scope changes, organizes your backlog, and prioritizes new bugs, escalating critical issues to the right person.
Everyone on your team manages projects—tracking updates, scoping work, balancing priorities. But your success shouldn’t depend on project management. With Height, autonomous workflows handle that mundane upkeep, so your team can focus on building great products.
If you’re ready to stop managing projects, it’s time for Height. Join the new era of product building—where projects manage themselves.
Sign up for Height today and offload project upkeep for good. Visit height.app/SEdaily to get started.
This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you’re building a, B2b, SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like single sign on, skim provisioning, fine grained authorization and audit logs.
That’s where WorkOS comes in with easy to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day one without slowing down your core product development today, some of the hottest startups in the world are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Perplexity, Versal, Brex, and WebFlow. WorkOS also provides a generous free tier of up to 1 million monthly active users for user management,making it the perfect authentication and authorization solution for growing companies.
It comes standard with rich features like bot protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and more. If you are currently looking to build SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider using WorkOS.
The APIs are easy to use in modular, letting you pick exactly what you need to plug into your existing stack. Integrate in minutes and start shipping enterprise plans today.
Check it out at WorkOS.com.
