Semiconductor company chief executives of Taiwanese origin are leaving an indelible mark on history. Jensen Huang, who leads Nvidia — the world's largest company by market capitalization — is known as the "Napoleon of the semiconductor industry." Born in Tainan, Taiwan in 1963, Huang immigrated to the United States at age 9 and founded Nvidia, a company specialized in graphics processing units (GPUs), at age 30. Three years later, he received a letter from the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, which read, "I would like to receive your help in the fields of high-speed internet and video games." This is how the close ties between Samsung Electronics and Nvidia began.
Lisa Su, who built AMD into the No. 2 player in the GPU industry while competing against Nvidia and Intel, is also Taiwan-born. Huang is Su's first cousin once removed. Taiwanese people have nicknamed the pair "the two geniuses born in Taiwan." Su moved to New York at age 3, majored in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and rose rapidly through the ranks at Texas Instruments (TI) before becoming head of IBM's semiconductor research center. Her achievement of replacing aluminum with copper as the wiring material in semiconductors is regarded as a feat that changed semiconductor history. Su took the helm of an AMD that held a non-investment-grade rating and transformed it into a top-tier company.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest foundry, is referred to as the "sacred mountain protecting the nation" in Taiwan. Founder Morris Chang was born in 1931 in Zhejiang Province, China, and immigrated to the United States to escape the Chinese Civil War and the Japanese invasion. He completed his studies at MIT and worked at TI. At the earnest request of the Taiwanese government and its promise of investment support, he moved to Taiwan at age 54 and established TSMC. Huang would later confess, "Without TSMC, Nvidia would not have been possible."
This week, Huang is visiting South Korea to meet with the heads of major conglomerates — including Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Hyundai Motor, LG Electronics and Doosan — to discuss cooperation on semiconductors and physical artificial intelligence (AI). In this period of industrial transition toward AI, no single company can win the competition alone. Expectations are that the "second gganbu meeting" between Korea's conglomerate chiefs and Huang will serve as a valuable catalyst for strengthening supply chain ties.
