TSMC founder Morris Chang’s major worry: US-China decoupling
- A split between the world’s two biggest economies would not only harm China, it would ‘slow down everybody’, says Chang
- The giant Taiwanese chip manufacturer is building two factories in Arizona, the first of which is scheduled to be fully operational next year
The one thing that comes closest to keeping Morris Chang, the tech king of Taiwan, up at night is decoupling of the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China.
“It looks like countries are mad at each other, and that worries me,” Chang, the 91-year-old retired founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, said on Thursday at an Asia Society event in New York.
TSMC, the world’s largest producer of advance semiconductors, is Asia’s most valuable company with a market cap of over US$400 billion.
In discussing decoupling, Chang cited the book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Harvard professor Graham Allison.
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Biden tours new Taiwanese chip-making plant in Arizona, fans US-China semiconductor rivalry
“It was a situation where the existing power, which is the United States, is confronting the emerging power, which is China,” Chang said, noting that Allison’s book gave 18 examples where an existing power confronts an emerging power, and war resulted in 12 of those 18 occasions.
