Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

By 2015, thanks to these acquisitions, GlobalFoundries was by far the biggest foundry in the United States and one of the largest in the world, but it was still a minnow compared to TSMC. GlobalFoundries competed with Taiwan’s UMC for status as the world’s second-largest foundry, with each company having about 10 percent of the foundry marketplace. However, TSMC had over 50 percent of the world’s foundry market. Samsung only had 5 percent of the foundry market in 2015, but it produced more wafers than anyone when its vast production of chips designed in-house (for example, memory chips and chips for smartphone processors) were included. Measured by thousands of wafers per month, the industry standard, TSMC had a capacity of 1.8 million while Samsung had 2.5 million. GlobalFoundries had only 700,000.