The economics of chip manufacturing required relentless consolidation. Whichever company produced the most chips had a built-in advantage, improving its yield and spreading capital investment costs over more customers.

Minister Li followed through on his promise to find the money for the business plan Chang drew up. The Taiwanese government provided 48 percent of the startup capital for TSMC, stipulating only that Chang find a foreign chip firm to provide advanced production technology. He was turned down by his former colleagues at TI and by Intel. “Morris,

Chang had lived the longest was Texas. He held a U.S. security clearance for defense-related work at TI. He was arguably more Texan than Taiwanese. “Taiwan was a strange place to me,” he’d later recall.

idea of separating chip design and manufacturing had therefore already been percolating in Taiwan for several years before Minister K. T. Li offered Morris Chang a blank check to build Taiwan’s chip industry.

As early as 1983, Ogarkov had gone so far as to tell American journalist Les Gelb—off the record—that “the Cold War is over and you have won.” The Soviet Union’s rockets were as powerful as ever. It had the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. But its semiconductor production couldn’t keep up, its computer industry fell behind, its communications and

Toshiba, a DRAM giant, a mid-ranking factory manager named Fujio Masuoka developed a new type of memory chip in 1981 that, unlike DRAM, could continue “remembering” data even after it was powered off. Toshiba ignored this discovery, so it was Intel that brought this new type of memory chip, commonly called “flash” or NAND, to market. The biggest

Sony, which was unique among Japanese semiconductor firms in never betting heavily on DRAMs, succeeded in developing innovative new products, like specialized chips for image sensors. When photons strike their silicon, these chips create electric charges that are correlated to the strength of the light, letting the chips convert images into digital

One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s recounted a Kremlin official who declared proudly, “Comrade, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”

The USSR’s “copy it” strategy had actually benefitted the United States, guaranteeing the Soviets faced a continued technological lag.