From castoff to chip titan: Morris Chang founded TSMC at 56 – and changed the world

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In 1983, Morris Chang was 52 years old and unemployed for the first time in his life.

For 25 years, he had been the highest-ranking Chinese American at Texas Instruments – rising from engineer to group vice president and general manager of the global semiconductor business. He had led TI past Intel in the memory-chip wars and was widely regarded as the heir apparent to the CEO’s office.

Then the company passed him over for the top job – a decision many insiders attributed to his ethnic background. A new CEO arrived, and Chang found himself sidelined, demoted, and stripped of his core responsibilities. His marriage crumbled under the strain. In his autobiography, he would later describe his final five years at TI as the most desperate period of his life.

“The debt was paid. The fate was fulfilled,” he wrote. “It was time to leave.”

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Starting Over at 54

Most executives in his position would have accepted that their biggest opportunity had passed. Chang did the opposite.

He turned down offers from major US corporations and accepted a position at Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) – a government-backed R&D lab with meager resources and no semiconductor industry to speak of. The salary was a fraction of what he had earned in Texas. But Chang saw something others didn’t.

In 1985, he moved to Taiwan. Two years later, at the age of 56, he founded a company called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry.

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A Revolutionary Idea – and a Laughable One

At the time, the semiconductor industry operated under the IDM (Integrated Device Manufacturer) model: companies designed, manufactured, and sold their own chips. Chang’s proposal – a “pure-play foundry” that would manufacture chips for other companies without designing any itself – was met with widespread skepticism.

“I went to Intel. I went to TI. No one believed in it,” Chang later recalled. Industry insiders scoffed: “What is Morris Chang even doing?”

But Chang saw what others missed. Building a wafer fabrication plant cost billions – a barrier that trapped talented chip designers inside large corporations. Startups couldn’t afford to compete. His bet was not that the market was already large, but that once manufacturing was removed as a constraint, the market would become enormous.

Eventually, Philips and the Taiwanese government took a chance on him. The rest is history.

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Today’s TSMC: The World’s Most Indispensable Company

Now, nearly four decades later, TSMC produces approximately 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Every iPhone, every NVIDIA AI processor, every modern car, every data center, every piece of medical equipment – all rely on chips manufactured in TSMC’s cleanrooms.

The company has enabled the rise of fabless giants like Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, and MediaTek, transforming the semiconductor industry from a vertically integrated monopoly into a sprawling ecosystem of specialized players. Chang didn’t invent the chip. He invented the business model that unlocked an entire industry.

In 2024, TSMC’s market capitalization exceeded $800 billion, making it one of the most valuable companies on Earth – larger than Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm combined.

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Rejection Was Not the End – It Was the Beginning

Chang did not build his greatest company at 25. Not at 35. Not at 45. He built it at 56.

“I was rejected, overlooked, and written off,” he said in a rare interview years later. “But rejection is not the end of the story. Sometimes it is the moment the real story begins.”

His journey stands as one of the most remarkable second acts in business history – a reminder that being passed over does not mean being finished. Sometimes, it means being redirected toward a destiny far greater than the one you imagined.

Morris Chang retired from TSMC in 2018 at the age of 87 – still actively shaping the company he founded when most people were planning retirement. He passed away in 2025, leaving behind a legacy that powers the digital world.

From a 52-year-old castoff to the father of the global semiconductor industry – all because he refused to believe that being overlooked meant being finished.