Interview with a former $Intel (INTC.US)$ employee who worke...

Interview with a former $Intel(INTC.US)$ employee who worked in the semiconductor industry for 30 years. Explaining the advantages and relationships between $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ , $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ , $Intel(INTC.US)$ and others:

- He believes $Intel(INTC.US)$ 's foundry is underloaded and subscale, which makes it inefficient. On the contrary, $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ has a very clever model where they burden their suppliers with some of the development costs.

- In his view, because of $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ 's strong purchasing footprint, everyone wants to work with them and develop their IP for $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ . Also, the EDA suppliers want to make money supplying EDA tools that are qualified on the TSMC technology rather than if $Intel(INTC.US)$ is doing it.

- Working at $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ , you are pushed more to grow, while at $INTC, there are more standard work roles. $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ leverages the Taiwanese work culture. The expert also thinks $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ will find a good fit in Japan, as there is a similar work culture.

- When it comes to customers, there are six that matter: $Apple(AAPL.US)$ , $Qualcomm(QCOM.US)$ , $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ , $Advanced Micro Devices(AMD.US)$ , $Intel(INTC.US)$ , and $Broadcom(AVGO.US)$ .

- The expert explains his view that $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ went partly to Samsung because they were deprioritized by $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ . However, they have become more unhappy with their relationship with Samsung because of the lack of delivery consistency and yield of the chips.

- The expert describes $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)$ strong-arming $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ at some point with their prepaid contract.