Apple和台积电的250亿美元大赌注
posted on 10 Aug 2022 under category 商业投资
Jeff Williams
Shortly after the introduction of the Cray 2 supercomputer, 25 years later, we put the same processing power into peoples’ pockets with an iPhone 4 in 2010.
It was actually 2010 that the first seeds of our partnership between Apple and TSMC were planted. I had flown to Taiwan and had dinner with Morris Chang and (his wife) Sophie at their house. It was a wonderful dinner.
We were not doing business with TSMC at that time, but, we had a great conversation. We talked about the possibility of doing stuff together, and we knew the possibilities were great if we could take leading-edge technology and marry it with our ambitions.
It seems obvious right now, but it wasn’t then, because the risk was very substantial.
The nature of the way Apple does business is we put all of our energy into products, and then we launch them.
If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want leading-edge technology, but we want it at established technology volumes.
That may be what Morris Chang refers to when he mentions ‘intense.’
On the TSMC side, that means a huge capital investment. It means ramping faster than the more careful yield plan that the industry is used to.
Together, we decided to take the bet, to take the lead and Apple – this was our first engagement — decided to have 100 percent of our new iPhone and new iPad chips — application processors — sourced at TSMC.
TSMC invested $9 billion and had 6,000 people working round the clock to bring up the Tainan fab in a record 11 months, and in the end, the execution was flawless. We’ve gone on to ship over half a billion chips together in that short window, and I think TSMC has invested $25 billion — $9 billion on that first venture — there are very few companies in the world that would spend $9 billion in capital across everything and without a single debt.”
蔣尚義Chiang:
On top of that, these days if you want to develop the leading-edge technology, your cost, you need to have at least about $2 billion dollars in the budget to be able to develop the most leading-edge technology. Then if you have $2 billion dollars, your revenue needs to be about $40 billion dollars revenue.
Fairbairn: $40 billion dollars?
Chiang: $40 billion dollars, yeah. That’s fine today. It’s only TSMC, Intel and Samsung who can afforddeveloping more leading-edge technology because they’re all $40 billion dollar above. And number four is less than $10 billion dollar, so they cannot afford that.