TSMC

Morris Chang built the company on an idea that was new in 1987: a pure-play foundry that only manufactures for others and never competes with its customers using products of its own. That made it possible to design chips without owning a fab, and so the entire fabless industry came into being — Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple's processors, AMD after 2009.

The company led the way to 7 nm, 5 nm and 3 nm while Intel fell behind. Concentrating the world's most advanced manufacturing in one company on one island has turned the industry into a geopolitical question, which is the backdrop to American and European efforts to build domestic fabs.