Foundry

Building a state-of-the-art chip factory costs tens of trillions of won. So the work split into companies that only design (fabless) and companies that only manufacture (foundries). Nvidia and Apple only design, and leave the making to foundries.

TSMC of Taiwan is the largest, and Samsung Electronics and Intel, among others, compete with it. What counts is how fine the circuits are and how few defects there are.

It is like an author writing a manuscript and a printing house printing the book. The printing house (foundry) prints the books of many authors.

Only a few factories in the world can make the most advanced chips, so when one of them has a problem, electronics and the AI industry everywhere are shaken.