Che-Chia Wei, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), said it will take a long time for Elon Musk’s plan to build massive, cutting-edge chip plants from scratch to come to fruition, and that his company is not afraid of competition from Intel, Samsung, or anyone else in the chipmaking business.
“I would say only ‘good luck’ on Elon Musk’s terafab,” Wei told the company’s annual general assembly on June 4 in answer to a shareholder’s question about the SpaceX CEO’s plans for a plant to produce one million wafers per month. “It will take quite long to [materialize].”
“In the past 30–40 years, we always faced all kinds of competition and we are not afraid of competition,” Wei said. “In the past, I think we won, and I believe we will continue to win.”
Wei commented specifically on TSMC’s relations with Intel, as its longtime customer is now increasingly competing with the Taiwanese chip titan in the realm of contract chipmaking and chip packaging services, rather than sticking to only producing chips for in-house use. “Now Intel is still one of our top ten customers,” Wei said. “We want to earn money from them and also would continue to protect our own intellectual properties and trade secrets.”
