Our entire global economy hangs on 1 company on 1 teeny

Our entire global economy hangs on 1 company on 1 teeny 100 miles off the coast of China. I bet you can't even name it. It's TSMC. And without it, experts say our entire economy would be down like $10 trillion. Most people couldn't explain to you why. Let me fix that. To understand TSMC, you have to go back to the 1970s. Taiwan had just been expelled from the United Nations. No natural resources, no oil like their neighbors. Diplomatically they were isolated. They only had 1 big industry, assembly for cheap electronics like radios and TVs. But they had a vision to climb up the ladder to more advanced technology production. The charge was led by founder Morris Chang, a semiconductor engineer who spent 25 years at Texas Instruments in the United States, but then was passed over for CEO. That rejection propelled him back to Taiwan to build advanced electronics. He made a critical early decision. There are effectively 3 steps to make a chip. First design, then manufacture or fabricate. Finally, package and sell. Everyone else was doing the whole process together. Chang instead said, let's manufacture the chips for everyone else. This was his trillion dollar decision because now all of the design players, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and more, flocked to TSMC to fabricate their own chips. They trusted TSMC with secretive designs because they weren't making their own, so they weren't gonna copy it. By 2014, Apple even moved their entire iPhone chip production to TSMC. Today, 24% of TSMC's total revenue still comes from Apple. Even crazier, they also make Nvidia's H100, Vera Rubin and Blackwell, Rubin and Blackwell chips, plus AMD's M1300 series. So basically all of AI runs TSMC rails. To give you a sense of scale, TSMC has 65% of the whole world's global foundry market and 92% of the advanced chips market, a near total market monopoly on this 1 tiny, isolated island geopolitically. This has huge implications. Some call TSMC as Silicon Shield for Taiwan, protecting it from its neighboring China. At this point, TSMC is the most important factory in the world by far. While many nations, the US included, are furiously trying to build a backup plan, the products from this tiny island are secretly running the world.