The $550 billion firm today controls more than half the global market for made-to-order chips and has an even tighter stranglehold on the most advanced processors, with more than 90% of market share by some estimates. “You can only build one story at a time.” “We always say that it’s like building a high-rise,” one TSMC section manager tells TIME, pointing to how his technicians diligently follow instructions dictated to them via tablet. Only after six to eight weeks of painstaking etching and testing can each wafer be carved up into individual chips to be dispatched around the planet. Above their heads, “claw machines”-nicknamed after the classic arcade game-haul 9-kg plastic containers containing 25 individual slices, or “wafers,” of silicon on rails among hundreds of manufacturing stations, where they are extracted one by one for processing, much like a jukebox selecting a record. Inside its boxy off-white headquarters in sleepy Hsinchu County, technicians in brightly hued protective suits-white and blue for employees, green for contractors and pink for pregnant women-push polished metal carts under a sallow protective light.
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