A sizzling potato: Morris Chang is a legendary determine within the semiconductor enterprise. The Taiwanese-American businessman and electrical engineer based TSMC in 1987, and is named the daddy of your complete semiconductor trade of Taiwan. And he is nonetheless making some daring predictions in regards to the future.
Chang not too long ago said that the present demand for AI {hardware} accelerators is so excessive that his firm will quickly need to multiply its manufacturing capability at staggering charges. Chang spoke throughout the inauguration ceremony of TSMC’s first manufacturing plant inbuilt Japan, stating that he’s anticipating a brand new “chip renaissance” for the Asian nation.
The TSMC founder stated he spoke with unnamed representatives of AI chip corporations, and that these govt figures made some unprecedented requests to the Taiwanese foundry. “They aren’t speaking about tens of hundreds of wafers,” Chang stated, they need TSMC to construct new manufacturing crops. At this charge, TSMC might want to open three, 5, ten new fabs, Chang said.
GPUs and different specialised chips are based mostly on extremely parallel designs, offering a major enhance in AI functions equivalent to machine-learning mannequin coaching or inference-based chatbots. Demand for these silicon merchandise is larger than ever; whole firms are re-focusing their business across the new trade hype and Nvidia – the undisputed herald of the AI growth – not too long ago admitted that it will be unable to fulfill the world’s starvation for extra AI chips by itself.
Nevertheless, constructing a wholly new chip manufacturing plant is an extremely expensive venture, even for one of many few world-class foundry corporations like TSMC. After his bombastic predictions, Chang then provided a extra tempered forecast for the longer term. The TSMC founder predicts that precise trade demand for brand new AI chips will doubtless be “someplace within the center,” between tens of hundreds of wafers and “tens of fabs.”
Whereas attending the opening ceremony of TSMC’s new Japanese plant, Chang stated that he first arrived within the nation in 1968, to start out a three way partnership between Texas Devices and Sony. After founding TSMC, Chang noticed the cultural and expertise similarities between Taiwan and Japan for the then-nascent semiconductor trade.
Within the late Nineteen Eighties, the Asian nation owned six of the highest ten world chipmakers. After lacking the PC revolution, Japan’s lead was later eroded by rivals from the US, Taiwan, and South Korea. As we speak, the world’s largest chip producers are all outdoors Japan, whereas native shopper electronics firms nonetheless maintain vital market shares within the picture sensor enterprise (Sony), automotive functions (Renesas, Rohm), and NAND Flash reminiscence chips (Kioxia).
