The Shovel Sellers in a Digital Gold Rush
Let’s be brutally honest. Making an advanced semiconductor is fantastically, eye-wateringly difficult. It’s not something you just decide to do over a weekend. ByteDance and its comrades might design the most brilliant chips known to man, but they still need someone to actually build them. This requires an ecosystem of hyper-specialised companies, the ones who provide the essential, and often monopolistic, tools of the trade.
This is the classic picks and shovels play. When everyone is rushing to find gold, the smart money is often on the fellow selling the equipment. In this case, companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) are the foundries, the ones with the colossal factories that cost billions to build. They are the bedrock of the entire industry.