May 19, 2026
In a recent interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, President Donald Trump slammed Taiwan’s semiconductor sector, arguing that it has only grown as large as it has because previous presidents didn’t place tariffs on the chips that were sold to the U.S. He went so far as to claim that Taiwan “stole our chip industry” (1).
Trump has made similar comments for years, often arguing that aggressive tariffs could have prevented chip manufacturing from moving overseas. “If they would’ve put tariffs on chips coming in they would’ve never left,” he said in the interview. “We lost the chip industry.”
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But the history behind Taiwan’s rise in semiconductors is far more complicated and deeply connected to the United States itself.
The company at the center of that debate is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. Despite being one of the most important companies in the global economy, TSMC largely operates behind the scenes.
TSMC was founded by Morris Chang, a China-born engineer who became a US citizen and spent 25 years working at Texas Instruments before helping build Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.
The chips that TSMC manufactures power iPhones, Nvidia AI systems, AMD processors, electric vehicles and countless other products Americans use every day. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, giving the island enormous economic and geopolitical importance (2).
The company behind Taiwan’s chip dominance has deep American roots
Trump framed Taiwan’s rise as something taken from the United States. But TSMC itself was built in large part by someone who was shaped by the American semiconductor industry.
TSMC founder Morris Chang was educated at Harvard and MIT before spending 25 years at Texas Instruments, one of the pioneering US semiconductor companies. During his time there, Chang helped develop manufacturing and management techniques that would later shape modern chip production (3).
Chang eventually left Texas Instruments (4) and in the 1980s, moved back to Taiwan and founded TSMC (3), pioneering a business model focused entirely on manufacturing chips designed by other companies. That distinction turned out to be revolutionary.
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At the time, many American firms still handled both chip design and manufacturing internally. But as production became more expensive and specialized, more companies outsourced manufacturing to firms like TSMC (5).
In other words, Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance wasn’t built overnight. It emerged over decades as American companies increasingly focused on chip design, while Taiwan invested heavily in manufacturing infrastructure, engineering talent and long-term industrial policy.
Ironically, many of the companies now dependent on TSMC remain American. Apple, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm still design some of the world’s most valuable chips in the United States — they just rely on Taiwan to build them (6).
This means that, rather than being “stolen,” Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance was built with significant help from American talent, education and corporate expertise. Trump’s comments may reflect growing concern over US reliance on overseas chip manufacturing, but the history of TSMC suggests the industry’s shift abroad was driven less by “theft” than by decades of globalization and complex business considerations.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
YouTube (1); Council on Foreign Relations (2); The New York Times (3); Business Insider (4); Reuters (5); Reuters (6)
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Clay Halton is an associate editor at Money.ca, covering a wide range of consumer-focused financial stories. He has over eight years of experience in digital publishing and has written and edited for outlets including PCMag and Investopedia.
