Why Your Entire Digital Life Depends on This One Island

Introduction

Chips? Sounds tasty, right? And an island full of them? Delicious, but this article is about computer chips made out of metal, not potatoes!

Odds are that the device you are using to read this article or do anything on a screen has a chip inside it. They are built for a variety of purposes, from those in laptops and smartphones, to the ones you find in self-driving cars and household appliances. They are important because they keep our world running, even if we do not know it.

Where Are Chips (Not the Edible Kind)?

Computer chips, essentially, are just tiny pieces of a semiconductor material, like silicon. Semiconductors fall between normal conductive metals and non-conductive ones. This means they conduct electricity, but not as easily as other metals. This trait of the metal is important to its function.

Fun Fact: Silicon is the most common material in semiconductors. Technology had a big boom in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is why the area is sometimes known as “Silicon Valley.”

Within these insanely small pieces of metal, millions to billions of transistors, resistors, and capacitors can be found. Together, these components process data and store information, regulating electric signals in the process. As time has gone on, more and more of these components are fit into smaller pieces of space, allowing for improved efficiency.

Many of these high-end chips go into devices that we commonly use, acting as their CPU (central processing unit, the “brains”) or the RAM (Random-Access Memory, “short term memory”).

Chip Nation

Many of the most notable companies that use these chips are found in the United States, like Apple and Google. As a result, the US produced some of its own chips, but the majority come from Taiwan and even some plants that operate in the US are owned by Taiwanese companies!

In the 1970s, the Industrial Technology Research Institute, or ITRI, was founded to import technology from the U.S. Li Kwoh-Ting, an economist from Taiwan, saw semiconductors, a fairly new technology at the time, as a path for Taiwan to boost its economic strength.

TSMC

TSMC Logo

About a decade and a half later, in 1987, Morris Chang founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). They revolutionized the semiconductor industry within Taiwan, Asia, and the whole world. Clients like Apple and NVIDIA were able to design chips with TSMC at lower prices than other companies.

Others followed in the footsteps of Chang, like UMC and ASE, that arose in an area of Taiwan known as the Hsinchu Science Park. This area is dense with semiconductor fabs and design centers. Throughout the island, semiconductors took over and it become the largest export of Taiwan.

Today, TSMC is the world’s largest chip maker, owning about 70% of the industry. They have also been working on AI chips that are growing in popularity. There is a good chance that the device you are using to read this article has a chip made by TSMC itself! Many of their fabrication facilities, where these chips are made, are found throughout Taiwan, China, Japan, and even in the US. Design centers throughout the world also exist. One of the most notable of these is a large complex in Phoenix, Arizona.

Inside TSMC Arizona

TSMC’s Fab 21 in Phoenix, Arizona

TSMC Arizona is the most advanced chip manufacturing plant in the United States, leading to the first American-made TSMC chips. The $165 billion semiconductor manufacturing complex spans more than one thousand acres with over 3,000 employees. Within this fab, the 21st of TSMC, the massive clean room contains the machines that transport the metal wafers. 700 automatic pods take care of movement until the wafers are fully processed and ready for being exported. Workers have to wear special “bunny” suits to maintain the level of sanitation found here.

Arizona is a desert, and water shortages can be a major issue. In order to prevent this problem from getting worse, TSMC Arizona is able to recycle up to 90% of the water it uses, making TSMC the greenest semiconductor manufacturer in the world.

Summary

Semiconductors fuel everything in our lives, from the phone that we call our loved ones with, to the safety features in the cars we drive. Even new technologies like artificial intelligence rely on semiconductors, as they are the bedrock of computer engineering. Without them, our world would completely stop.

Credits

Erickson, Noah. Turned-on Black Samsung Android Smartphone Displaying Clock at 12:09. Pexels, https://www.pexels.com/photo/turned-on-black-samsung-android-smartphone-displaying-clock- at-12–09–404280/. Accessed 13 Mar. 2026.

Rie, Pok. Dell Motherboard and Central Processing Unit. Pexels, https://www.pexels.com/photo/dell- motherboard-and-central-processing-unit-1432675/. Accessed 13 Mar. 2026.

Taiwan Semiconductor: The $1.65 Trillion Gatekeeper of the AI Boom. 8 Jan. 2026. Yahoo Finance, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/taiwan-semiconductor-1-65-trillion-151600032.html. Accessed 13 Mar. 2026.