I SAW THE FACE OF GOD IN A CHIP FACTORY

INSIDE TSMC, THE MYSTERIOUS TAIWANESE COMPANY AT THE CENTER OF THE GLOBAL SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY.

- VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

[1] A QUINTILLION MINIATURE MASTERPIECES

I ARRIVE IN Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan-and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company..

By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world's 10 most valuable companies. It's now bigger than Meta and Exxon. The company also has the world's biggest logic chip manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world's most avant-garde chips-the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance of hard power is predicated.

Perhaps more to the point, TSMC makes a third of all the world's silicon chips, notably the ones in iPhones and Macs. Every six months, just one of TSMC's 13 foundries-the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan-carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple. In the form of these miniature masterpieces, which sit atop microchips, the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.