TSMC: The Chokepoint Foundry

NVIDIA designs the most powerful AI chips in the world, and yet it does not manufacture a single one. That job belongs to one company in Taiwan, and the entire AI boom runs through its factories. When demand for H100 and Blackwell GPUs went vertical, the bottleneck moved instantly to TSMC, and specifically to a packaging technology most people have never heard of, which was sold out regardless of how many chips NVIDIA could design.

For founders and operators, this is a sharp lesson in where power actually concentrates in a supply chain. No consumer has ever bought a TSMC product, yet governments are spending tens of billions to hedge against its location. The case sharpens how you map your own value chain to find the indispensable step, the one layer below the visible winners that captures durable leverage. What makes that position so hard to dislodge, even while staying invisible, is the part worth opening the app for.