Morris Chang

Based on Wikipedia: Morris Chang

The Man Who Made Modern Computing Possible

In 1987, a fifty-six-year-old engineer in Taiwan had an idea that would reshape the global economy. Morris Chang proposed something that seemed almost absurd to the semiconductor industry: a company that would manufacture chips but design none of its own. Every major chipmaker in the world—Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola—designed and built their own products. Why would anyone trust their proprietary designs to an outside factory?

Three decades later, the company Chang founded, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (known universally as TSMC), manufactures over ninety percent of the world's most advanced chips. Apple's processors, Nvidia's graphics cards, AMD's central processing units, Qualcomm's mobile chips—all of them come from TSMC's fabrication plants in Taiwan. The company Chang built is now valued at over a trillion dollars, and the technology it produces sits at the center of everything from smartphones to artificial intelligence to military systems.

But before any of this, Morris Chang was a refugee twice over, a failed doctoral candidate, and a man who gave up his childhood dream of becoming a novelist because his father told him to be practical.

A Childhood Across Borders

Chang was born in Ningbo, China, on July 10, 1931, to what he described as a middle-class family. His father, Chang Wei-kuan, worked as a finance official for local government and later as a bank manager. The senior Chang had received what was then called a "Western education" at Kwang Hua University, which would later become East China Normal University.

The young Morris wanted to write. He dreamed of becoming a novelist or journalist, someone who shaped the world through words. His father had other ideas. Wei-kuan pushed his son toward more practical pursuits, setting a pattern that would recur throughout Chang's early life—external forces redirecting his path in ways that seemed limiting but ultimately proved fortuitous.

Chang's childhood was defined by movement. The Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937, sent his family fleeing across China. They moved from Ningbo to Nanjing, then to Guangzhou, then to Hong Kong, then to Chongqing, and finally to Shanghai. Each relocation followed his father's career or the advancing Japanese military. Chang spent most of his primary school years in British Hong Kong, from ages six to eleven, only to be uprooted again in 1941 when Japan occupied the colony.

The family returned to Shanghai and Ningbo briefly, then made their way to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China. After the war ended, the Chinese Civil War began its final phase. In 1948, as Communist forces advanced and the Nationalist government collapsed, Chang moved to Hong Kong once more.

He was seventeen years old and had already lived through two wars, multiple occupations, and countless dislocations. He had no way of knowing that three more decades of wandering lay ahead before he would find his permanent home.

An Immigrant's Education

Hong Kong in 1948 had no universities specializing in science or technology. This fact determined Chang's next destination. His father arranged for him to attend college in the United States, with help from Chang's uncle, Chang Ssu-hou, a professor at Northeastern University.

In July 1949, Morris Chang enrolled at Harvard College. He was eighteen years old, the only Chinese student among eleven hundred undergraduates, and completely alone in a country he had never seen. Despite these challenges—or perhaps because of them—he placed in the top ten percent of his freshman class.

Chang majored in applied physics and engineering sciences at Harvard, but he quickly recognized a problem. The career prospects in pure physics seemed limited compared to practical engineering. In his sophomore year, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as MIT.

Here, Chang's work ethic emerged in full force. To pay for his education, he won a scholarship and worked as a copy typist and research assistant for a professor named Joseph Kaye. He took the maximum allowable course load each semester and attended summer classes instead of taking breaks. The typical undergraduate degree at MIT required three years after transfer; Chang finished in two.

By 1953, at age twenty-two, he held both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT. He earned a second master's degree, a Master of Engineering, in 1955.

Then he failed.

The PhD That Wasn't

Chang attempted the doctoral qualification examinations at MIT twice. He failed both times. This was not unusual—the exams were designed to be brutal filters—but for a young man who had excelled at everything he attempted, the experience was crushing. He left MIT without the doctorate he had planned to earn.

The year was 1955, and Chang faced a choice. Ford Motor Company offered him a position. It was a safe option, a respected company, a clear career path. Chang turned them down.

Instead, he joined a small, obscure division of a company called Sylvania Electric Products. The division made semiconductors—a technology so new that most people had never heard of it. The transistor, the fundamental building block of modern electronics, had been invented only eight years earlier at Bell Labs. Semiconductors seemed promising but risky, a niche technology competing against the established vacuum tube industry.

Chang's job was to improve the manufacturing yield of germanium transistors. Yield, in semiconductor manufacturing, refers to the percentage of chips that actually work after fabrication. Making semiconductors is extraordinarily difficult; the slightest contamination or imprecision can ruin an entire batch. Improving yield meant making the technology economically viable.

This was the work that would define Chang's career: not inventing new devices, but figuring out how to manufacture them reliably, efficiently, and at scale.

Rising Through Texas Instruments

In 1958, Chang moved to Texas Instruments, a company that was rapidly becoming a giant in the semiconductor industry. Texas Instruments, or TI, had helped invent the integrated circuit—the technology that allowed multiple transistors to be combined on a single chip, enabling the miniaturization that would eventually produce smartphones and supercomputers.

Chang thrived at TI. Within three years, he had risen to manage the engineering section of the company. More importantly, TI recognized his potential and invested in his education. In 1961, the company offered to sponsor his doctoral studies.

This time, Chang chose Stanford University instead of MIT. He studied under John L. Moll, William E. Spicer, and Gerald Pearson—luminaries in the field of semiconductor physics. In about two years, he completed his doctorate in electrical engineering. His dissertation examined the optical properties of gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material used in specialized applications like lasers and high-frequency electronics.

The failed MIT student had become Dr. Morris Chang, Stanford PhD. He was thirty-three years old.

The Idea That Changed Everything

Chang spent twenty-five years at Texas Instruments, eventually rising to group vice president responsible for the company's worldwide semiconductor business. During this time, he developed two ideas that would prove revolutionary.

The first was pricing ahead of the cost curve. This meant selling semiconductors at prices that would only become profitable after manufacturing improved. In the short term, TI would lose money on each chip. But the low prices would drive sales volume, which would justify investments in manufacturing improvements, which would eventually reduce costs below the selling price. It was a bet on the future—sacrifice immediate profits to dominate the long-term market.

This approach was controversial. Traditional business logic said you should never sell products below cost. But semiconductors were different. Their manufacturing costs dropped dramatically with scale and experience, following a pattern later called Moore's Law (after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore). Chang understood this dynamic intuitively and pushed TI to exploit it.

The second idea was more subtle but ultimately more consequential. At TI, Chang worked on a project where the manufacturing was done by IBM rather than by TI itself. This was one of the earliest semiconductor foundry relationships—one company designing a chip, another company building it. The arrangement worked, and Chang filed away the insight for future use.

The Revelation in Japan

In the early 1980s, while still at Texas Instruments, Chang made an observation that would change his life. TI operated semiconductor factories in both Texas and Japan. The Japanese factory achieved twice the production yield of the Texas factory.

Twice.

This wasn't a marginal improvement or a statistical fluctuation. The Japanese factory was producing working chips at double the rate of its American counterpart. Chang investigated and found that the Japanese staff and technicians were better qualified and stayed in their jobs longer. American workers, by contrast, had higher turnover and less specialized training.

Chang tried to recruit the same caliber of workers in the United States. He couldn't find them. The American educational system and labor market simply weren't producing enough skilled semiconductor technicians, and those who existed could easily jump to other opportunities.

The conclusion was inescapable: the future of advanced semiconductor manufacturing lay in Asia, not America.

The Taiwan Gamble

By the late 1970s, Chang's career at Texas Instruments had stalled. The company shifted focus toward consumer products—calculators, digital watches, home computers—and away from the semiconductor manufacturing that Chang loved. He left TI in 1983 and briefly served as president and chief operating officer of General Instrument Corporation.

Then, in 1985, an unexpected opportunity arose. Sun Yun-suan, the Premier of the Republic of China (the formal name of the government in Taiwan), recruited Chang to become chairman and president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute, or ITRI. This was a government-sponsored organization responsible for promoting industrial and technological development in Taiwan.

It had been three decades since Chang left China during the Civil War. He had become an American citizen in 1962, built his career entirely in the United States, and had no particular connection to Taiwan. The move was supposed to be temporary—a few years helping a developing nation build its technology sector.

Chang never left.

The Foundry Model

At ITRI, Chang saw an opportunity that no one else had recognized. The semiconductor industry had a growing problem: designing chips was becoming increasingly separate from manufacturing them. Small companies and startups could design innovative processors but couldn't afford the billions of dollars required to build their own fabrication facilities. Large companies like Intel could afford the factories but faced capacity constraints and conflicting priorities.

Chang's solution was elegant. He would create a company that manufactured semiconductors for other companies. TSMC would own no chip designs; it would simply build whatever its customers wanted. This was the foundry model—named after the metalworking foundries that cast parts for other manufacturers.

In 1987, Chang founded TSMC with an unusual financing structure. The Dutch electronics giant Philips provided production technology and intellectual property licenses in exchange for 27.6 percent of the company. The government of Taiwan, through its National Development Fund, provided the remaining capital for a 48.3 percent stake. Chang assembled a team and began building the factories.

The timing was perfect. The late 1980s and 1990s saw an explosion of "fabless" semiconductor companies—firms that designed chips but relied on foundries to manufacture them. Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and countless others emerged during this period. Without TSMC, most of them could not have existed.

The Scale of Success

TSMC grew into a colossus. By the 2000s, it was one of the most profitable chipmakers in the world. By the 2020s, it was indispensable. The company's manufacturing processes became so advanced that competitors couldn't keep up. Intel, once the undisputed leader in semiconductor technology, fell behind TSMC by multiple generations.

The implications extended far beyond business. TSMC's dominance made Taiwan strategically vital to the entire global economy. Every iPhone, every high-end computer, every advanced military system contained chips that could only be made in Taiwan. This gave the island an unusual form of protection: no major power could afford to see TSMC's factories damaged or destroyed.

Chang recognized this dynamic and occasionally spoke about it publicly. In 2022, he gave an interview to the Brookings Institution in which he criticized American efforts to build domestic chip manufacturing. The United States government was spending tens of billions of dollars trying to reduce dependence on Taiwan. Chang called it "a very expensive and wasteful exercise in futility."

He argued that America would increase onshore semiconductor manufacturing somewhat, but at very high cost, producing chips at high unit costs that couldn't compete with TSMC's efficient Taiwanese factories. When TSMC announced plans to invest twelve billion dollars in a new factory in Arizona, Chang noted that the decision came at the urging of the American government, implying it was political rather than economically optimal.

Retirement and Legacy

Chang served as TSMC's chief executive from the company's founding in 1987 until 2005. He returned to the CEO role in 2009 and continued as chairman until his retirement on June 5, 2018. He was eighty-six years old.

The government of Taiwan showered him with honors. President Tsai Ing-wen awarded him the Order of Propitious Clouds in 2018 and the Order of Dr. Sun Yat-sen in 2024 for his contributions to technology development. He served as Taiwan's presidential envoy to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum multiple times, representing his adopted country on the world stage.

His personal life, like his professional career, involved multiple chapters. Chang met his first wife, Christine Chen, while he was at MIT and she was at Boston University. They married in 1952, when both were twenty-two, and separated by 1981. They didn't formally divorce until 1991, partly for the sake of their daughter. In 2001, Chang married his second wife, Sophie—a cousin, as it happens, of Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn, another giant Taiwanese technology manufacturer.

As of late 2025, Chang's net worth stands at approximately six billion dollars. He remains a revered figure in Taiwan and a respected voice in global technology policy. MIT named a building after him and his wife in 2016. The IEEE, the world's largest organization of electrical and electronics engineers, awarded him its Medal of Honor in 2011—the highest recognition in the field.

The Foundry Revolution

To understand why Morris Chang matters, you need to understand what the semiconductor industry looked like before him. In the 1980s, if you wanted to make advanced chips, you needed to own your own factories. This meant billions of dollars in capital investment before you could sell a single product. Only huge companies could play the game.

The foundry model changed everything. Suddenly, a brilliant engineer with a good idea could design a chip, send the blueprints to TSMC, and receive finished products a few weeks later. The capital barriers collapsed. Innovation exploded.

Consider Nvidia, which today dominates the artificial intelligence chip market. When Jensen Huang founded the company in 1993, Nvidia had no factories. It couldn't afford factories. Instead, it focused entirely on designing graphics processors and relied on TSMC to build them. This allowed Nvidia to iterate quickly, taking risks on new architectures without betting billions on manufacturing facilities. Today, Nvidia's AI chips are manufactured by TSMC, and the company is worth over a trillion dollars.

The same pattern repeated across the industry. Qualcomm, which makes the chips in most Android phones. AMD, which competes with Intel in personal computer processors. Broadcom, Marvel, MediaTek—the list goes on. None of them could have grown as they did without the foundry model that Chang created.

The Geopolitical Dimension

There is a darker side to TSMC's dominance. Because so much of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is concentrated in Taiwan, the island has become a geopolitical flashpoint. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has not renounced the use of force to bring it under control. The United States has ambiguously committed to Taiwan's defense.

TSMC sits at the center of this tension. If China were to invade Taiwan and seize TSMC's factories, it would control a chokepoint in the global technology supply chain. If the factories were destroyed in a conflict, the entire world economy would suffer catastrophic disruption. There is no quick way to rebuild such facilities; the knowledge, equipment, and supply chains took decades to develop.

Some analysts have called this the "silicon shield"—Taiwan's semiconductor industry provides a form of protection because no major power can afford to see it harmed. Others worry that it makes Taiwan a more tempting target, not a safer one.

Chang himself has expressed skepticism about efforts to reduce this concentration. When America, Europe, and Japan announced massive subsidies to build domestic chip factories, Chang suggested they were wasting money. The economics of semiconductor manufacturing, he argued, still favored Taiwan. The American factories would produce chips at higher costs, making them uncompetitive in global markets.

Whether he's right remains to be seen. The CHIPS Act in America, with its fifty-two billion dollars in subsidies, is still in early implementation. TSMC's Arizona factory is under construction. Intel is attempting a comeback. The next decade will reveal whether the foundry model's geographic concentration was a temporary phenomenon or an enduring feature of the industry.

The Novelist Who Never Was

Morris Chang once wanted to write stories. His father told him to be practical, so he became an engineer instead. But in a sense, Chang did write a story—one of the most consequential narratives of the late twentieth century.

He was a refugee who became an immigrant who became a pioneer. He failed his doctoral exams and then earned his doctorate. He watched American manufacturing decline and drew conclusions that others missed. He saw an opportunity in an obscure corner of the technology industry and built it into a trillion-dollar empire.

The device you're using to read or hear these words almost certainly contains chips made by TSMC—chips made possible by the foundry model that Morris Chang invented. Every time you use a smartphone, every time an AI model generates text, every time a car navigates itself or a satellite transmits data, you're benefiting from his insight.

Some entrepreneurs build companies. Morris Chang built an industry. And along the way, he made his small island nation indispensable to the world.