Morris Chang

Morris Chang (Zhang Zhongmou) was born in 1931 in Ningbo, China. His family fled to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War, and he eventually moved to the United States. He studied at Harvard (one year), MIT (bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering), and earned a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering. He spent 25 years at Texas Instruments, rising to become Senior Vice President responsible for the company's worldwide semiconductor business. In 1985 the Taiwanese government recruited Chang to lead the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). There he conceived a revolutionary idea: a semiconductor company that would only manufacture chips designed by other companies, rather than designing its own. In 1987, at age 55, he founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The "pure-play foundry" model was initially dismissed by industry giants who designed and manufactured their own chips. Chang's model proved transformational. It enabled the fabless revolution — companies like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Apple, and AMD could design cutting-edge chips without investing billions in manufacturing facilities. TSMC invested relentlessly in manufacturing technology, achieving process leadership by the 2010s. Today TSMC produces over 90% of the world's most advanced chips (below 7nm), making it arguably the most critical single company in the global technology supply chain. Chang retired as chairman in 2018 at age 87, after serving in leadership roles for over three decades. He remains an influential voice on semiconductor policy and geopolitics. His legacy is singular: he invented an entirely new business model that restructured the global semiconductor industry, enabled the smartphone revolution, and positioned Taiwan as an indispensable node in the world's technology infrastructure.