Companies in Hsinchu

In 1987 Morris Chang made a bet that the semiconductor industry thought was crazy: build a company that only manufactures chips for other companies, selling no products under its own name. Four decades later, that company — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — fabricates more than half of the world's advanced chips, and the 'pure-play foundry' model it invented has become the backbone of the entire industry. TSMC's customers are the names on the chips: Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and hundreds of fabless designers who bring only designs and leave with wafers. Its technology lead comes from relentless process-node progression — 5nm, 4nm, 3nm, and beyond — plus a willingness to spend: annual capital expenditure of US$30 billion or more keeps its fabs ahead of every rival. The company's first fab outside Taiwan, in Arizona, began production in 2024, part of a global expansion driven by geopolitical demand. With roughly 76,000 employees and revenue near US$70 billion, TSMC's practical importance is hard to overstate: virtually every advanced chip in every smartphone, server, and AI accelerator on earth passes through its cleanrooms. For electronics buyers, TSMC is less a supplier than an industry utility — the one foundry the rest of the world quietly depends on.

MediaTek is one of the world's largest fabless semiconductor companies and the biggest supplier of smartphone system-on-chip (SoC) processors by volume, founded in 1997 in Hsinchu, Taiwan, as a spin-off of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). The company employs about 20,000 people and generates annual revenue of roughly US$14 billion, designing chips for smartphones, smart TVs, Wi-Fi routers, and automotive systems.\n\nMediaTek's Dimensity series powers a large share of the world's Android smartphones — from budget devices to flagship models competing with Qualcomm's Snapdragon — while its Kompanio and Filogic lines serve Chromebooks and networking gear. The company is a leader in connectivity silicon, shipping more Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G modem chips than almost any competitor, and has made aggressive moves into automotive with its Dimensity Auto platform and into AI with its server and edge inference chips. Its manufacturing is outsourced to TSMC, making it one of the foundry's largest customers.\n\nFor electronics manufacturers, MediaTek is a high-volume, cost-effective silicon partner with complete reference designs that shorten time-to-market for phones, TVs, and IoT devices, and its design-win model creates steady demand for packaging, testing, and component supply chains across Asia.