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TSMC is the world's largest chip maker by advanced output, yet you will never find a phone or laptop carrying its own brand of processor.

As a pure-play foundry, what does TSMC actually do?

It manufactures chips designed by other companies
TSMC is a contract foundry: fabless clients like Apple and NVIDIA design the chips, and TSMC fabricates them. Focusing entirely on manufacturing made it the supplier behind much of the world's most advanced silicon.

As a pure-play foundry, TSMC manufactures chips that other companies design, meaning clients like Apple or Nvidia create the blueprint for a processor and send it to TSMC, which handles the enormously complex and capital-intensive job of actually fabricating the silicon.

TSMC does not design or sell processors under its own brand, that describes a different kind of company, called an integrated device manufacturer, which both designs and fabricates its own chips. It also doesn't write software; chip design and software development are separate specialties from the physical manufacturing TSMC focuses on.

By specializing purely in manufacturing rather than also competing with its own customers on chip design, TSMC built enough trust and scale that most of the world's biggest chip designers, who are effectively rivals to each other, are comfortable using the very same foundry.

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